Gmail Is Down: End Of The World, Internet Era Style
by
on February 24, 2009,
This afternoon I’ve spent a few minutes offline rebooting my machine after that. After the reboot I’ve had the Twhirl windows open, one of them with Twitter stream from my friends - and to my surprise it was populated with countless messages from my network about Gmail being down. A quick check proved that Gmail was down for me as well so it now looks like the popular free email solution is actually down in quite a number of countries of the world with users complaining on Twitter from everywhere. Users in the US are mostly shocked as some of them have woken up and fired their Gmail accounts first thing in the morning (usual tradition, of course) and found totally nothing there.
When trying to refresh the page in their browsers people are served error 502 informing users of a server error and suggesting to try to reload the page in 30 seconds.
There’s no update about the situation on the official Gmail blog for now but there will probably appear an explanation soon as the number of affected users is obviously high enough for the error to get noticed as #gmail is already on the 2nd top positions in the trending topics on Twitter Search and will most certainly climb to the very top position in the next few minutes.
Messages marked with #gmail appear on Twitter in hundreds every few seconds with people using every language I can recognize so it looks like it is a really large-scale worldwide problem for Gmail. At the same time I have just received an email forwarded by a filter to my other email account (non-Gmail) quite all right so it looks like the backend is still functioning somehow while the user interface is not loaded for some reason.
But of course the most interesting thing is that people actually cry aloud like it is the end of the world with many of them admitting they basically are unable to work without Gmail and don’t even have any tasks they could do without using the Gmail accounts. So this is what reliance on one particular service means: when it goes down you are left with nothing at all to replace it. I wonder how many times Gmail will have to go offline to demonstrate people an alternative solution is needed - just in case.
UPDATE: Gmail seems to be back to normal to the majority of users - more than half an hour after the first complaints arrived. Still waiting for the official comment from the team.
UPDATE 2: The official explanation from the Gmail team is available in this blog post.
