The Night They Drove Old G-mail Down

G-mail went down today.

David Besbris at The G-mail Blog:

We’ve fixed the issue, and Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

Nik Cubrilovic at Tech Crunch:

We wrote this morning about Gmail suffering some turbulence, but it appears now that it has completely crashed and disappeared. Both Apps For Domain and the usual consumer Gmail service are down completely. Google seem to be going backwards on fixing the problem, this morning they sent out an alert saying:

September 1, 2009 8:18:00 AM PDT
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

I use Apps For Domain for everything – my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.

It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers (Update: they are up, but slow). This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications.

Ben Parr at Mashable:

As you’re probably aware, Gmail’s been down for an extended period of time today. It’s placed stress on Twitter () and other parts of the Internet as people have panicked at every opportunity (for example, most of the Mashable () team). Gmail () seems to be back up, however. We just got through, although I had to prove I was not an evil robot attacking Google (). We haven’t received word from Google yet as to what caused the downtime.

Harry McCracken at Technologizer:

Sweeping Gmail blackouts remain relative rarities, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the service’s reliability recently. It often conks out on me temporarily, or behaves so slowly that it might as well be unavailable–and while the cause remains mysterious, I’ve experienced the same symptoms on multiple browsers on different PCs on a variety of networks.

Just this morning, I was soberly considering whether it was time to regretfully move on to something I might find less flaky. I’m still thinking that over, but today’s meltdown has convinced me that at the very least I need to be downloading my messages. I’m a mostly-happy Google freeloader, but the Gmail I’ve been using of late simply isn’t reliable enough to run a business on.

Chloe Albanesius at PCMag

Ryan Singel at Wired

Michelle Malkin:

Gmail has been down for at least an hour.

But don’t complain too loudly about it.

You know how Rahm Emanuel likes to exploit a crisis…and the last thing we need is another Email Czar.

Wonkette:

WE HATE TO BE LIKE THOSE PEOPLE WHO THINK A TEMPORARY GMAIL CRASH IS WORSE THAN HITLER & THE APOCALYPSE COMBINED BUT HONESTLY, IT’S JUST REALLY INCONVENIENT: As an actual monster once wrote, “Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the Gmail once stood.” Oh ho ho — but now it’s back up and working again? Thank you for keeping us safe, Dick Cheney!

James Fallows:

Depending on how long this takes to clear up — next few minutes, another hour or two — will no doubt set off various speculation about the vulnerability of cloud computing, about whether there are some aspects of scale too vast even for the unimaginably vast collection of Google servers, whether Twitter (now ablaze with reports) could be brought down in collateral damage, and so on. All of that in due course. Right now, it’s like living through real-time tech history!