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

I'm from the UK and I call it Gmail, so does everyone else I know who has a Gmail account...

My non-gmail was working perfectly :) Why dont we all use exactly the same provider so we can all be offline at the same time!

So how many kids couldn't get to their myspace e-mails or FW: FW: FW: FW: read this all the way or......

boo bloody hoo!

Pheewww... dunno about causing "outrage in the blogosphere", because I couldn't log into my Blogger account to post about it. Or My Google Docs. Strangely though, Google Reader and Calendar still worked.

I still can't log into Blogger this morning, although Gmail is working again now. Cookie problem, probably.

I didn't even notice.

Think it was on Saturday afternoon, couldn't find Google (.com or .co.uk) or YouTube in DNS, and couldn't log on to Google Talk, for a period of a few hours. All other sites that I tried were fine. This was from my home Linux and Windows boxes, as well as the web browser on my Wii, and tried resetting the Bebox several times. Think that it must have been localised to my ISP (Be Unlimited) or my exchange, as I didn't see it mentioned anywhere.

Hmm, lets see what that image in the top left of my Gmail window says:

"Google Mail - BETA"

Beta, to me, doesn't strike me as meaning 100% uptime.

Why the 'outrage' then?

Steven R

Paris - because even she woudn't expect perfection from anything marked beta, regardless who supplied it.

I was without access to my email for a short space of time last week thanks to Google's incompetence. I *demand* a full refund.

I don't visit such blogs or even use the online email access. So this article is the first I hear of anything going wrong other than it feels like mail is faulty. Why the heck don't they email gmail account holders and say what they had to say in the blog. They can't be feeling my pain if they hardly try to apologies. Thinking of switching. Was hoping this was it, sick of change my emails.

I have to admit, whilst I get frustrated when things go offline, I'm still amazed what service I get without paying a penny. For starters, gmail gives me more storage than my company email... How can people complain so much?

(From another gmail user in the UK)

and yahoo now offer ymail.com addresses for those who failed to get a half decent address with gmail the first time around.

so that won't be confusing at all.

If people actually gave a damn about their email provision, you'd be paying for an SLA and support (phone and/or email) which covers any compensation when things go wrong (which they will do so at some point).

I have no sympathy whatosever for anybody whinging about this problem unless they've paid Google for a Premier account. FWIW it knocked out two of my Premier Google Apps email accounts, but quite frankly, it WAS a temporary problem and IMAP access worked just fine.

Well I use the paid-for Gmail service so I can use my own domain and wasn't too bothered about the short outage. What fuss.

Once again, yesterday evening, I was unable to access my .mac/me mail.

And now I hear gmail was down.

Computers suck.

I noticed this as well. Changed the DNS servers to OpenDNS and it worked ok. With BeUnlimited as well, so must have been a dns issue.

Google Apps suffered the same email outage last night, but Premier and Education Edition customers have an SLA.

Frankly, as much as it inconvenienced me, writing and sending out press releases via my Google Apps setup, the fact that it was up before midnight was good enough for me.

The outage had some effect though... they upgraded Google Apps to almost the latest version of Gmail (Google Apps does not have the "Always use HTTPS" option yet, but the new style interface is now available). At least my data did not go missing, which is more than what can be said for other providers.

If you were told that your email address ended in @googlemail.com then don't worry as this was just for legal reasons (mentioned above).

You can still use, and tell people that your email address ends in @gmail.com instead if you prefer as it will still work.

Yup it seems to have been a Be(there)-only problem. Exact same symptoms seen on my Be connection, but could log in fine over my O2 mobile connection. Read somewhere that it's been posted on the website as a known outage.

That's the first problem I've had in my 8 months with them, best ISP I've had since EFH got gobbled by the plus.net borg.

Be/O2 had some serious routing problems on Saturday. Something to do with peering issues or something. I did try to find out more at the time, but could not get on-line....

It was a BeThere (and therefore also an O2) problem. No reg, no google (which also breaks eclipse.org it seems, downside to having google powered search..) but Beeb still worked.

Traceroute was dying at BeThere's routers.

Like someone said its a beta, and I never remeber reading anything where Google said you get 100% uptime with any of their services.

John Delaney - This was due to a fault on the Be/o2 network, two stories one is of a fire - very unlikly. The other option and the better one was a massive firewall config cock up, o2 stores lost connection to their internatl network which runs over a Be cloud, similar home broadband was the same. Some ports work eg VPN/RDC but port 80 was out.

Sounds like port 80 got blocked on the firewall, at the same time locking out o2 from it, so sent a man with a laptop to console up to fix

Kimbie

No, that was just Be's huge outage. They lost a large amount of connectivity across all their customers.

If you weren't on Be, you'd not have noticed it. If you were at the pub, you'd not have noticed it.

"Cos the same time GMail went tits-up, MobileMe was also having one of its regular lie downs in a darkened room.

I do not see what all the fuss is about, if it is that critical that people have 100% up time maybe they should spend some cash on a proper multi site high availability solution. Oh, but that costs money.

www.cobweb.com

use a USA proxy to Register it

I'm fine... barely noticed the outage. Infact, I have more of a chance of my crappy sky router dying than not logging into my email - which is a pretty awesome service for free... I know I know, they own my soul, and can sell it to the highest bidder via advertising, but really - how much does that really bother me right now??

Phorm on the other hand... I might get google on their arse!!

If anything on the internet vanishes, I suspect my ISP first.

Yesterday, I had an embarassing outbreak of caffiene deficiency syndrome, and missed all the opportunities for outrage.

>>>Beta, to me, doesn't strike me as meaning 100% uptime.

>>>Why the 'outrage' then?

Could it be that it's been a "beta" for years?? Face it, slapping a "beta" jpg on the site does not a beta make. There comes a point where whether you call it a beta or not, it's in production use, and you have to take that responsibility seriously.

Too many places call things "betas" just so they have a fallback position when they almost inevitably break stuff. It's a byproduct of, and a crutch for the "deploy it now, test it later" development culture that web 2.0 has thrust us into. If gmail is a beta, we should have to pay for it by having ads displayed.

Once you start making commercial gain from a product, you can't really call it a beta anymore.

Gmail suffers a couple of hours major downtime, something which really does not seem to happen often, and the blogosphere/twittersphere reacts as though Google had just admitted to serving fried babies in the staff restaurants.

3 words: Get. A. Grip.

Seriously. Close the browser. Go outside. Have a beer. Chill out. It's not the end of the world. You'll live.

Geeze, I really never noticed. You mean I missed all that great action

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 :)

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.

....that'll stop these relentless Post Office closures in the UK...

Mine's the one with stamps in the pocket.

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.