Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Web services, Google
Google explains why Gmail went down
If you're a hardcore Gmail user, I don't need to tell you that Gmail was down yesterday. The Gmail Blog has an explanation of the outage, which officially lasted for 100 minutes. So, here's the reason you couldn't get to your Gmail yesterday, straight from the horse's mouth: apparently Google took down some servers for routine maintenance. This would have been fine, but because of some recent improvements to the way Gmail handles requests, the request routers became overloaded. This caused them to shunt the workload over to other request routers, which quickly became overloaded, too. Oops. Fortunately, Google has tons of extra capacity just waiting to be switched on in this kind of emergency, so things were back up and running relatively quickly. Google has quite rightly determined that their request routers need some failure isolation improvements to prevent a similar chain reaction in the future, and they promise they're working on it. Maybe this will quiet down all of the "#gfail" naysayers who freaked out via Twitter the minute the service went down yesterday.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Money Mike said 2:48PM on 9-02-2009
I noticed it wasn't working properly yesterday, because it was going in and out for me. I must have caught it at the end because it seemed like it only lasted for about a half hour.
I have the offline feature enabled, so it kept switching to offline mode. The problem was that it was only showing one of the six email strings in my Inbox and I needed to get to one of those missing emails to get a phone number. Clearly, it wasn't synced up properly for offline mode, but I couldn't figure out why. Every time it came back online, I would try to manually sync it up and even though it would appear to complete the job, those messages were gone when it went back offline again.
I thought maybe it was a Firefox version problem (3.52) that was causing it to not quite work properly with Gears, so I then tried the syncing process in Chromium (when i had online access, of course). The problem with Chromium, though, is that it would never finish syncing for me.
This all happened late in the afternoon yesterday when I was getting ready to leave work, so I finally just gave up and assumed it was either an issue with my company's network or with Gmail itself. When I logged on late last night, it worked fine, but I completely forgot to give it another shot at syncing it up. I'll have to do that now while I'm thinking of it.
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Money Mike said 2:57PM on 9-02-2009
On a side note, how does that whole "first" thing work? Do I get credit for saying it now, or does it only count if I actually attempt it in the first post?
Also, what exactly do I win for posting first and and then subsequently pointing out in a childish manner that I've done so? I've never really been aware of the details surrounding that victory and why it's so important. Is there a point system behind the scenes, do I get entered in some private raffle, or do you just mail me a bunch of cash directly?
Any information you can share would be extremely helpful and most appreciated. Thanks in advance.
FIRST!!!!!!1
Lukeyo said 3:16PM on 9-02-2009
Satire or not, you win the prize.
...The prize being a downvote.
Money Mike said 3:43PM on 9-02-2009
This coming from someone who never posts anything of substance. Funny.
Interesting that you would go out of your way to be lame, but I guess that just reinforces your value to this site.
sitruc said 2:56PM on 9-02-2009
My mom rarely calls me, but she actually called me yesterday and asked me what was up. I checked at my office and it wasn't working for me either. I didn't have anything to tell her at that point.
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Peter said 4:37PM on 9-02-2009
I certainly wasn't happy about the outage, but come on people.
I would love to see how you would react if people expected everything you do to be correct and working 99.999% of the time.
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Money Mike said 6:03PM on 9-02-2009
I wasn't upset about it, other than the fact that I was a little inconvenienced when I was looking for a phone number I forgot to get earlier. It doesn't appear that Jay (the author) was really that torn up about it either. He was just sharing the information on the topic, which I found to be useful.
If you're confusing my long reply for frustration, then I'm sorry you misunderstood. I just felt like sharing my experience.
I think you'll find most people here to be big fans of Gmail, so I'm really not sure who your comment is directed to when you say "come on people."
Darren said 5:19PM on 9-02-2009
If Gmail is out for 100 minutes in 1 month or 1 year - that's totally acceptable - it is by FAR the best web based email system there is - and the fact they gave us a reason for it being out puts them even higher!
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Quikboy said 9:01PM on 9-02-2009
Funny, I thought Gmail pretty much never fails. Yet, when Windows Live Hotmail is down for just a short bit, people are ranting about the service from Microsoft.
It's just funny how people can be so attached to their brands.
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Balbino Vasquez said 9:37PM on 9-02-2009
If Live goes down (even for a month) I would not notice.
It just goes to show that live customers are less forgiving than g-mail users and rightly so, they get an inferior product just to test their endurance.
Quikboy said 5:47PM on 9-03-2009
@Balbino Vasquez: Uh, no. That's because there a heck of a lot more Hotmail users than Gmail users (thus a bit more outrage), and the media likes to report negative stuff about Microsoft.
As for inferiority, that's in the eye of the beholder. Hotmail is perfectly fine for what I need, and though it could use a few more features, I'm perfectly content with what I have. I have Gmail and the features are rather overated.
feraligatr8 said 5:37AM on 9-03-2009
I live in Vanuatu... a long way from America. Maybe I was asleep or out???? When I got back home yesterday and tried checking my email it wouldn't work so maybe I was out. What time did it happen?
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minirich said 5:53AM on 9-03-2009
This naysayers do they pay for the service. If not SHUT UP!
just my 2cents
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