Thread: Google Gmail crash

Google Gmail crash: What is Gmail?

Google’s web-based email service, Gmail, has crashed, leaving millions of users across the globe unable to send or receive emails. But what is Gmail, and why is the outage such an issue?


* What is Gmail? Gmail is a free, web-based email service provided by Google, which has tens of millions of users worldwide. Due to a trademark dispute, the service is also known as Google Mail in the UK and Germany.

* How does Gmail differ from competitors? Gmail first launched in April 2004 as an invitation-only service, before becoming available to the general public in February 2007. It was an instant hit with web users, who were attracted to the service because it offered 1GB of free message storage, a huge increase on the 2MB or 4MB offered by other web-based email services, such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, at that time. In recent years, Google has increased that free storage limit to more than 7GB.

* What has caused the service to crash? Google has declined to say what has caused the Gmail outage, but the crash is particularly surprising because the service is usually very robust. The last major Gmail incident occurred in October, when some users couldn’t access their Gmail accounts for almost a whole day. However, the problem appears more widespread this time around. It seems that the technical issues are affecting only the web-based version of Gmail, and that users are still able to send and receive messages using third-party mail applications, and mobile devices, such as iPhones and other handsets, many of which rely on Gmail’s IMAP (internet message access protocol) capabilities to handle messages, rather than the more common POP3 protocol.

* How many people will be affected by the outage? According to web monitoring company ComScore, more than 113 million people use Google’s Gmail service worldwide every month. Although Google acknowledged a “number of users” were having trouble with the service, it declined to say how many people were affected. However, Gmail users from across the globe have been leaving messages on Twitter describing problems with the email service in many countries throughout Europe, including Spain and Malta, and even as far afield as India and Australia. An increasing number of corporate users rely on Google to power their office email systems.

* What happens next? Google says it is “working hard” to resolve the problem, although it gave no indication as to when Gmail would be back up and running. In the meantime, Gmail users are turning to third-party mail applications and mobile devices to access their messages. Longer term, confidence in Google’s ability to provide a robust email service could be dented, and some users may decide to look at alternative email providers.

Telegraph.co.uk

it'S working again. I was pretty shocked when I saw the errorpage ....

Well, its powered by human and machine so the occasional error is not avoidable

It was strange not being to get on to my gmail account much of this morning. So unusual, but all back to normal now. :)

My gmail was down for a bit today as well. All is good now. :)

I also encounter gmail's error recently, but now everything's back to normal!

Gmail blackout blamed on "data centre overload"

Google claims that yesterday's Gmail blackout was caused by one of its data centres becoming overloaded.

The Google webmail service was down for much of yesterday morning (UK time), with visitors to the Gmail website being presented with blank pages.

Google claims that server issues were responsible. "There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centres," the company's Gmail site reliability manager, Acacio Cruz, explains on the Gmail blog.

"This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data centre."

"Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data centre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data centre to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."

pcpro.co.uk

"There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centres,"

I am in the States and my email was down as well. Mobile email was down even longer.

Many community and technical colleges are using gmail for their email service. I applied to a school and was given an email just for applying. I am sure this will put a load on their servers.

I am sure that google will provide stable work! Now everything is fine.

to err is human..