Google fixes, apologises for Gmail outage
Published: 24 Feb 2009 16:58 GMT
Business and personal users of Gmail suffered a two-and-a-half-hour outage on Tuesday, but Google said it has fixed the problem.
"If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 9:30am GMT, our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email," said Acacio Cruz, Google's Gmail site reliability manager, in a blog post on Tuesday. "We're working very hard to solve the problem and we're really sorry for the inconvenience."
"The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored," Google later said on its Gmail status page. "Many" users were affected, Google said.
"We did do everything to restore access as soon as we could," Cruz then wrote in a second blog post. "Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem."
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Google promises that customers paying for the Google Apps service will have access to Gmail for at least 99.9 percent of each month, or it will pay a penalty. Last year, the company said it had not yet dipped below that level.
The company took advantage of the problem to tout the new Gmail Labs feature that permits offline access to Gmail for customers in the US and UK. Using that feature, people can read, search, label and archive their email and compose new messages, but messages are not sent or received until network access is restored.
Outages are problematic for Google as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the internet rather than on corporate computers. However, Google has argued that its service availability competes with most organisations' ability to run their own email servers.
ZDNet UK's David Meyer contributed to this article.
Credit: Google apologizes for Gmail outage from CNET News
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