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Glad I have offline access installed...
cos thats how google rolls.
Gmail is available to me via iPhone and not available via Web service.
Location: Poland
It's 12.30 pm.
1) I usually avoid to download a backup of my email via imap on a client, because of the risk involving lost laptops and such I tend to access only the webmail, but maybe I should reconsider this decision. A 3 hour outage is nothing short of annoying in a working morning. Luckily today is a slow day (that's mardi gras after all) and my blackberry was still pushing my email flawlessly so I can't complain that much, but .. hey. It makes you think.
2) The Gmail web service for me was down from 10.30CET (Paris/Rome/Berlin time): I am a google apps "premier" customer and I was down exactly like regular users till 13.00CET at least, so Google is offering with premium paid services a 99,9% SLA which is not backed by any technical difference in the level of resiliency of their service. It's not like paid users are on a different server network or something like that. The emergency support system you're entitled as a premium customer has also not been helpful (I still have not reiceved any update on my ticket), so they don't consider it at all too ... Basically the premium service seems worthless. What's the point of paying for a SLA if you are going to experience the same downtime as regular users ? Just to reiceve some free service credit in the event of an outage ? Well, you could just use the free service then, and get all the free service you want anyway. That's something businesses should consider.
That's my point of view, indeed.
There are 24 hours in a day and 365 days a year. The downtime lasted approximately 3 hours as fas as I can tell. Thus we have:
(3/(24*365))*100 = 0.03425
Since 0.03425 < 0.1, it means you're still within the boundaries of your SLA. Actually, Gmail could be down like this 2 times again until the end of the year before their SLA breaks.
Considering that a 99.9% SLA for a webapp is pretty awesome, and that they used only 1/3 of the breathing room they gave to themselves, I wonder why you're being so annoyed. I would rather be amazed at the quality of the service than the opposite.
Now obviously Google may have missed the mark when it comes to communicationg about the downtime towards its customers, which is probably as bad as being down per se. But still, they performance is pretty amazing.
Hope it doesn't fall over again anytime soon *withdrawal twitching eases*
I dropped this service like a hot potato when they suspended my account for no reason with no warning then a month later just said oops someone screwed up it shouldn't have happened.
Anyone try to contact support? It's about a 2-5 day wait for a useless canned answer.
Remember the first web anon service turned out to be run by the spooks. Same deal. Hand your life over to Big Brother, be my guest.
I don't think any kind of outage as "normal", but if you think you can't function at all without mail for a couple hours, you might need to rethink the way you define work (or read the four hour workweek, getting things done, or any book which shows how to be productive working instead of being busy in front of a mailbox, or twittering about it).
gmail outage for 4 hourse or a lifetime of pain via microsoft products...hmmm, tough choice