2 Comments

The Cost of GMail Downtime? According to Google… 15 Free Days of Service

February 24, 2009 by in Random with 2 Comments

100% Uptime can’t EVER be guaranteed, but earlier today Google’s GMail service was down for about three hours today.

ots of folks are asking what happened, so we thought you’d like an explanation. This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

The bugs have been found and fixed, and we’re in the process of pushing out changes. We know how painful an outage like this is — we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future. #

Well, Google has decided to give a service credit to all its paid users and a BIG I’m sorry to its free users.

Google Inc. is making amends for an e-mail outage by giving 15 days of free service to businesses, government agencies and other subscribers who pay for an expanded version of the product.
The concession is meant to placate customers who were cut off from their e-mail accounts Tuesday for as long as four hours. The outage began at 9:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, causing more inconvenience in Europe and Asia than in the United States.#

Who do you use as your email provider? Do problems like that make you worry about Google more or less?


  • Grgry

    I’m with you in expecting that a 100% uptime, while likely a goal, is never a realistic expectation.

    In situations like these, I find how a company responds ridiculously important. Google, right off the bat admitted to the problem, gave as much explanation, if not more, than could generally be expected. Paid Google users received 15 days of free service without Google seeming to think twice. With the botched upgrade to MobileMe, 30 days of service was eventually provided for a much larger service disruption. It would’ve been nice to receive 15 days free for every 4 hours on that one!

  • Nathan Neulinger

    Your image makes a good joke with the ‘GMail Paper’ idea, but… I would gladly fork over $50 for a per-request “make me a DVD” archive with an copy of all my gmail folders along with enough offline or gears functionality so that it could at least be browsed and/or brute-force searched.

    That would more than cover the keep your own backup angle, as well as providing useful functionality.

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