If you live in the United States, chances are, you were asleep. But for those in other parts of the world, and those of us who are nocturnal, Gmail was down for well over an hour on Tuesday morning.
While this isn’t anything new, Gmail crashed a few times last year, it is the first time [...]
While this isn’t anything new, Gmail crashed a few times last year, it is the first time it has gone down since offline support was added. That fact actually caused quite a few people not to realize there was even an issue — until they tried to send a message. Another curiosity is that even with Gmail the web service was down, Gmail’s IMAP service was working to send and receive mail from email clients and devices such as the iPhone.
Also of note is that if everyone I follow on Twitter doesn’t use Gmail, it’s damn near close to everyone. At all points during the outage, almost my entire stream was consumed with tweets about Twitter being down. And Twitter Search, perhaps the ultimate search engine for what people complain about, not only had Gmail as a trending topic of discussions within minutes of Gmail failing, but it also saw the term “IMAP” rise into the top terms as well.
Gmail appears to be working again now, albeit slowly, at 3:15AM here on the west coast of the United States. Google is silent on the issue right now, but you can be sure it will weigh in tomorrow. As more and more people move their daily online activities to the cloud, companies like Google need to prove it can be a reliable replacement to desktop email. Features such as offline access make the easier, and it appears to have passed its first test tonight as even with the downtime, people could still at least access recent emails.
Of course, some of us don’t yet use offline access. So instead I complained about Gfail no less than six times in one hour on Twitter. I think it helped.
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