Gmail Hit by Global Outage

February 25, 2009: Gmail users around the world suffered through a two and a half hour outage yesterday, highlighting one of the potential downsides to cloud-based email systems.

“If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems,” wrote Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager, on the official Google blog. “Shortly after  9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.”

“We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.

To build confidence in its cloud-based solutions, Google promises 99.9 percent uptime to paying customers. Google claims that it has yet to dip below this threshold despite Gmail and Google Apps experiencing a 15 hour outage last August, but regardless that outage and now this global one don’t do wonders for the image of email in the cloud.

Of course, Cruz didn’t waste the opportunity to highlight the benefits of Google’s recent addition to Gmail Labs: offline functionality, which could have proved useful for the many cut off from their inboxes – even if they still couldn’t send and receive.

“Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox,” he wrote.

Google says that while some users may have to fill out a CAPTCHA message next time they log in, the issue is now resolved. It has apologised for the outage and says it is currently investigating the cause.

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