September 1, 2009 Gmail Outage

To all system administrator and/or email administrator out there don't feel bad if once a year you have un-schedule email downtime. Even a billion dollar company experienced their own email outage today, this is Google Gmail service. The Gmail service is down for about 100 minutes before they fixed the server overload issue.

"Around 12:45 PM PDT, a majority of Gmail users began having trouble accessing their accounts. During this interruption, users were still able to connect to their accounts via IMAP and POP. At approximately 2:15 PM PDT, the issue was resolved and access was restored. We use Google Apps here at Google, and our email accounts were among those that were impacted. I understand how disruptive this service interruption was for our users and customers, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience." (2009, googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

and a follow blog post here.

"Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation." (2009, gmailblog.blogspot.com)

In the future, if you suspect that you have Gmail or Google Apps issue you can check in http://www.google.com/appsstatus website.

I will definitely will stay with Google Apps and still recommend them as your alternative email service.