Gmail Down…Again

Posted on August 11, 2008

Though it seldom used to occur, the outages at Gmail are beginning to make one wonder about the reliability of home in the cloud.

There was some problem with Google Apps last week and now a system-wide outage has occurred today that left users pondering…is all this safe? Is it really the way to go, this cloud computing and messaging platform? Is this the sign of overload on the usage and users end, showing that as much as Google has shown off its hardware side that maybe they aren’t quite ready to handle the huge volume of Gmail and other apps?

I’m not sure how widespread the use of Gmail has become at the corporate level. But for those who have made the plunge and ridded themselves of Outlook or some other expensive client service, this outage surely made them question themselves and their heretofore ‘brilliant move.’
Another thought is that if an outage of this size can strike Google, the company with the totally awesome infrastructure, I wonder who — if any — can plan for the worst. I guess it’s time to stop picking on Twitter, who have been down more than up recently. In fact, you wonder what might be going on as in recent weeks, not only Google’s services but those of Amazon’s S3 and Apple’s MobileMe have gone on the blink, leading us to rethink our assumptions about the reliability of the web as a computing platform and local app replacement. Clearly there is work to be done…