Yesterday a very large number of Gmail users were locked out of their accounts as Google scrambled to fix a problem with the service some trace back to an upgrade to the Contact feature in Gmail. For Google customers this was the latest outage in a string of many that are becoming all to routine for both free and business customers that pay Google for Web services. Sporadic and mystery outages have angered Google users with increasing frequency.
The good news is Google restored Gmail access late yesterday for most affected customers. It also offered apology. Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson posted to the official Google Gmail Blog this statement: "We feel your pain, and we're sorry"
But for many Google's apology was not accepted. Messaging service Twitter was flooded yesterday with reports of Gmail's downtime with dozens of posts per second where Gmail users were highly critical of Google's inability to keep its service running smoothly.
Gmail has over 100 million users with over 20 million of them accessing the service every day, and that is without counting the business users who rely on Gmail. Many small companies' rely on Google's Gmail and Gtalk services and their activity came to a standstill yesterday afternoon, as reports show.
Google's Gmail blackout is just one of many Web service outages that reveal just how dependent Internet users have become on Web services. Recent outages have affected customers of Amazon's S3 service, Apple's MobileMe service, Netflix, and Yahoo.
There are suggestions that the Google outage was caused by a possible upgrade to the Google Contacts feature but nothing is officially confirmed yet. Also, in what is cited as an "outage contest," Apple's MobileMe was down yesterday for about an hour as well, but only affecting a small percentage of its users.
What can you do? When Google, the poster child for reliable Web services, has problems running a reliable 24/7 service you know their isn't much you can do. Perhaps you can chalk it up to the Internet still being in its infancy. One thing you can do is troubleshoot the problem to make sure your lack of access to a Web service isn't just affecting you (ruling out a OS or browser conflict). One handy Web service that is called DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com. Here, as the name suggests, you can report your own outage problems or see if others are having similar problems as you. Of course if that site is down you'll have to just wait it out like you do when their is a power failure.
As cloud services continue to become more mainstream, we will see this dependency.
According to this article, Gmail is one of Google's top disappointments. It's probably a little too harsh since it does have 100m users but the fact it's still in "beta" is beyond me.