Sounds Like Gmail Had a Case of the Tuesdays

Users of Google's Gmail service got an unanticipated boost in their productivity yesterday when an outage knocked the e-mail site offline for an hour or so in the afternoon.

For people accustomed to the boring predictability of a seemingly infinite Gmail inbox, seeing the site cough up only vague "server error" messages must have been jarring. Google apologized for the problems in a post on its Gmail blog yesterday afternoon, then explained what happened in a second post:

This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem -- we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers -- servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.

The "routine upgrade to improve reliability ironically went awry" play is a classic in the computing business -- it's IT's equivalent of the journalist explaining away an error by saying "I didn't think I had to check that fact because I've written about this topic so many times before." You can't be too surprised to see even the theoretically omniscient Google fall prey to this blunder; it's happened before and it will probably happen again.

But not all Gmail users lost access to their e-mail. As that second blog post goes on to note -- and as I saw myself yesterday afternoon -- if you'd set up a regular mail program to download your Gmail using either of the two Internet standards Google supports, POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), you would have retained access to all your old messages and should still have been able to get and send new Gmail.

This free, offline access constitutes one of Gmail's bigger advantages over competing Web-mail services. AOL offers both POP and IMAP access, but Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail only began enabling POP last winter, while Yahoo -- still the most widely used Web-mail option -- doesn't support regular mail programs in its free service.

But have you taken advantage of any of these fallback options, or do you keep going to your usual Web-mail site expecting that nothing will ever go wrong there? Have yesterday's Gmail misadventures persuaded you to reconsider?

Comments

I have been using Gmail since 2005. Yesterday was the first time I had trouble accessing my Gmail account. It is a great tool and my guess is that service will only improve.

Posted by: mclaughj | September 2, 2009 12:04 PM | Report abuse

If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium.

This just further validates my use of Thunderbird to IMAP my gmail to my local machine(s).

Posted by: Bush--notrelated | September 2, 2009 12:52 PM | Report abuse

A lot of people have been complaining about the google mail outage.

I would say they have a very good track record. Servers go down all the time.

Cloud computing is quite new and I feel pretty confident that when glitches arise google uses them to learn more. Cloud computing will, in the not too distant future, be the most reliable way to get work done.

Google is clearly the most forward thinking computer company on the planet right now. And the standard Google Apps package (free) is far superior to, say, what Yahoo! offers at a charge.

Posted by: aghastinsantafe | September 2, 2009 1:19 PM | Report abuse

I thought it was kind of ridiculous how much people were complaining about this. The service is free, and for what I pay for it(NOTHING!), I think it's pretty amazing. I can handle a two hour service outage once in a while.

Posted by: rchadha5 | September 2, 2009 1:35 PM | Report abuse

Yes, I use gmail with Apple's mail at home, and with my iPhone. IMAP for both.

For a while I assumed the problem was my employer, since my iPhone kept getting mail while my gmail session in my browser did not, and got the error message.

Posted by: ah___ | September 2, 2009 1:48 PM | Report abuse

Since when is Google omniscient? Don't blame Google for reporters bedazzled by technology.

The comparison of their error to a simple, journalistic fact-checking error is upsetting. It shows a lack of understanding of complex, grid software systems, which have hard-to-predict chain reactions. I don't usually like defending big corporations, but the insinuation that Google is trying to play down a major, avoidable blunder is unfair. It like complaining they couldn't predict that the butterfly would cause the hurricane.

Posted by: humbads | September 2, 2009 2:02 PM | Report abuse

If you don't have three copies of a file, it doesn't exist.

Posted by: WorstSeat | September 2, 2009 5:03 PM | Report abuse

I have no complaints about a free email service that has never caused me any problems. But with the outage, a "Boost in productivity" was hardly what I got, thank you very much. It is almost impossible for me to get much work done without my email.

Posted by: jillian_writes | September 2, 2009 5:28 PM | Report abuse

"Boost" in productivity with my email down? Uhm, the writer might want to re-think that.

Posted by: jillian_writes | September 2, 2009 5:30 PM | Report abuse

"The service is free"

I've seen this quite a bit. It's not free for those of us who use it institutionally. My organization pays about $50 per user per year, with about 900 users. There are *many* people using Gmail in corporate and academic environments, and many organizations are paying real money for the service.

And those are the people who really get upset when there are hours of downtime.

Posted by: JamesOfTucson | September 2, 2009 6:39 PM | Report abuse

Thank god, I was not affected.
-iphone to computer(pc) transfer

Posted by: softwaresoda168 | September 2, 2009 10:42 PM | Report abuse

One of the nicer aspects of gmail is exactly as you describe - I can use its web interface when I need to, while I also use the pop server to provide my mail to my iPhone and to the Mail app on my MBP.

Of course, back in the day I used Eudora when that was a useful tool...does it even exist any more?

Posted by: JoelB8 | September 2, 2009 11:07 PM | Report abuse

You guys trying to have a gsmoke sesh?

Posted by: BMACattack | September 2, 2009 11:19 PM | Report abuse

I am no great fan of gmail, as I have no use for all its gimmicks and find its insistance on linking messages together extremely irritating (not to mention the fact that it scans your message content and sends targeted advertising). But in any case the service is free and I can live with not being able to log on - I simply notified the person I was trying to reach, per sms, that there was going to be a delay. And no, I do not want to ever download my messages to my PC - the whole point of using webmail is to keep viruses well away from my computer, Kaspersky notwithstanding. If I need something from a message I copy it into a word file and save it, as one person said, in three different places.

Posted by: lisamarie1 | September 3, 2009 2:57 AM | Report abuse

Here I use IMAP for general email reading on Thunderbird and on my ipod Touch; however, if I need to find a specific email, then I hop over to the web version for its search ability.

I was super busy at work on Tuesday, so I didn't have an opportunity to experience the outage first hand, but I read about it here and on /.

Posted by: Annorax | September 3, 2009 6:33 AM | Report abuse

What's the big deal? If gmail went down for a day, then I'd grump, but I can live without my email for an hour.

Posted by: jimward21 | September 3, 2009 6:52 AM | Report abuse

All Google, all the time. Have not missed Outlook for a single moment.

Posted by: wovose | September 3, 2009 7:30 AM | Report abuse

For Joe, I still use Eudora (now 7.1). It has served me well since "the beginning" and I see no need to switch just for the sake of change. Eon of time in this constantly upgrading world of early adapters and those chasing the whirlwind.

Posted by: Geezer4 | September 3, 2009 8:42 AM | Report abuse

Gmail over iPhones anyday!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html?ref=technology

Posted by: cbmuzik | September 3, 2009 1:03 PM | Report abuse

Rob ,good reporting, on the short shut down ,
experienced by Google E-Mail Users. As you know that
Google contronls 65% of internet,interests.
also 7% is owned by other countries.
However with recent Microsft & Yahoo Deal
7/30/09,
that increased Yahoo internet 19.6% interest
combinded with Mircosofts 8.4% . Now, we are at 28 %. Technologies will handled by Microsoft.
No, it's still not as large as Google, but with the addition of the New "BING" seach engine . We should ask the question
>>> BING or Google ? dchomeboyz

Posted by: dchomeboyz | September 4, 2009 12:36 AM | Report abuse

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