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Gmail outage casts cloud over online services
by Jaspreet Virk - September 25, 2009 - comments
Though cloud computing has several advantages, the repeated outages have raised doubts over the adoption of these online applications
New York, September 25 -- In a yet another outage, Google Inc.'s Gmail service was unavailable for around two hours on Thursday morning, thus blocking access to e-mail accounts, contact lists, and related functions.
Google's Apps Status Dashboard at 7:29 a.m. PT stated, "We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we've provided a workaround below."
The workaround consisted of using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail instead of POP (Post Office Protocol) or Web.
In a blog post, Google engineering VP and "Site Reliability Czar" Ben Treynor apologized for Gmail's inaccessibility saying that the outage was a big deal. "We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again.”
Series of outages
The disruption is the latest in the serious of outages that have affected Google services lately. The Google News Web site also went offline Tuesday, when users trying to access the site received "503" server error message on their computer screens.
Further, on Sept. 1 Gmail service was offline for nearly two hours, an outage that affected majority of its 150 million users. The problem was blamed on routine upgrade errors.
Before this, users had experienced Gmail outage that lasted for several hours on Feb. 24. Minor problems were encountered on March 11, April 16 and May 8 as well.
Problems were also encountered in Microsoft's Hotmail service and Yahoo and the Hewlett-Packard Upline storage services this year.
Cloud’s credibility questioned
There are many major players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. investing in cloud computing and offering endless list of services through the Web from the cloud.
Microsoft has recently rolled out applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from the cloud via Web. Further, Google offers applications like Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs etc. to meet users’ office productivity needs.
Though cloud computing has several advantages, the repeated outages have raised doubts over the adoption of these online applications. Users will resist in moving their office productivity or communications to the cloud if doubts linger over its reliable availability.
David Coursey, an industry analyst, was quoted by PCWorld as saying, "Rather than adding features that add only questionable value to our lives, such as Sidewiki and Fast Flip news, maybe Google needs to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on quality and reliability for products many of us use every day?"