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Gmail outage causes outrage

'We feel your pain'

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Google has apologised to users unable to get into their Gmail accounts last night.

The ad serving giant blamed a problem with Gmail's contact system for stopping the service loading properly.

The official blog post was titled: "We feel your pain, and we're sorry."

The problem happened late afternoon Eastern Time and so caused an explosion in the US blogosphere. Google said it didn't usually respond publicly to such problems, but decided to because: "We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts."

Gmail is known as Googlemail in the UK and Germany. ®

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Latest Comments

Oh god...

I was there for the great Gmail outage of 2008. It was down for at most an hour. I'm not even sure how I managed to cope.

Oh yeah, I fired up mail2web.com and logged in through the Gmail POP server on there. No big deal, really.

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Heartbroken!

Just Kidding! Almost missed an interview coz the details was in gmail. But then heck...it was my own stupidity to rely on a service that I am not paying to meet my SLA.

But its only fair that there is so much fuss.... I am sure if hotmail went down, Microsoft would be flamed as well :)

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uptime

No company can provide 100% uptime 100% of the time. Things do happen. Give google some credit they give millions of customers hundreds of billions of gigabytes free storage, free bandwidth, free email blah blah. These things all cost money. Bandwith doesn't just appear. It isn't just there! It has to be paid for. Severs cost thousands and google will have hundreds of not thousands of servers to serve their community free. Stop complaining they dont charge you a penny for their 99.9% reliability uptime. They like every other company have problems sometimes. Thats life.

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