Gmail Gfails Again

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» 08 May 2009

Gmail Gfails Again

Earlier today, Google's free web-based email service Gmail suddenly became inaccessible to its users. Many people were surprised after they were greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" note and an apologetic "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable," message while attempting to access the service. Afterwards, the brutally frank words of "Gmail" and "Gfail" soon cluttered the Twitter landscape.

Obviously, these irate Gmail users didn't take too kindly to the buggy email's recommendation of "trying again in a few minutes" after doing just that and getting the same error message over and over. As such, their dissent flooded Twitter by the hundreds every minute. One recent Twitter search even revealed that the majority of the protesters originated from Asia and Europe as well, judging from the timing of their outrage (6:00 AM EST).

Tragically, this isn't the first time that there was trouble in Gmail paradise. A similar Europe-wide outage happened on February 24 at 1:30 AM PST that lasted for several hours. This of course caused an identical deluge of protests and cries of shock across the worldwide web. The people at Google eventually blamed the fiasco on their data center's failure to cope with user traffic after it was taken offline for routine maintenance.

As of this writing, any attempt to access the online version of Gmail has yielded erratic results, while both IMAP and POP3 are largely unavailable. Some users even complained that Google apps are down as well, although others noted that they can access Google apps just fine. In contrast, all these services were still useable during the February 24 Gmail glitch.

To be fair, outages and errors are the norm even for large and dependable corporations like Google. However, the outage Gmail suffered last February was catastrophic enough for the company to personally apologize for it. In lieu of the February outage, a smaller malfunction last March, and today's Gmail fiasco, perhaps several steps must now be taken in order to avoid such mishaps from happening again in the future. A pattern of disaster has already been established, and it's in the best interests of Google to do something about this recurring quandary.

The good news is that paying Gmail customers are promised a 99.9% uptime after the disaster or the company will reimburse them in some manner and degree. Google has also issued a statement addressing the problem. They claimed to immediately inspect and fix the error within twenty minutes. They afterwards apologized for tine inconvenience and encouraged users suffering from further technical troubles to go the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard for additional assistance.