We wrote this morning about Gmail suffering some turbulence, but it appears now that it has completely crashed and disappeared. Both Apps For Domain and the usual consumer Gmail service are down completely. Google seem to be going backwards on fixing the problem, this morning they sent out an alert saying:
September 1, 2009 8:18:00 AM PDT
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.
I use Apps For Domain for everything – my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.
It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers (Update: they are up, but slow). This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications.
Update: The Google App Status dashboard says that there is currently a ’service disruption’ with email.
Update: The outage immediately became a trending topic on Twitter, with thousands of tweets from users noticing and complaining about the outage. The outage that we reported this morning was not as widespread, but could point to a potential originating cause.
Update: Still down. I wonder if the paid Apps for Domain users, who have an SLA, are also down?
Update: New status message:
September 1, 2009 12:53:00 PM PDT
We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
They will be back in an hour (the engineers must have been out at lunch).
Update: Apparently IMAP/POP are up for some. Setting up IMAP …
Update: New message from the Google Twitter account:
We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing Gmail. We’re working on fixing it. Apologies for the inconvenience
Update: For those of you who use the web interface who want to also grab their email with IMAP or POP, instructions courtesy or Rajeev. Only works if you had IMAP/POP enabled before this downtime.
SMTP: smtp.google.com
(TLS, port 557, enable authentication)IMAP: imap.gmail.com
(Enable SSL, port 993)login: user@domain.com
Update: Downloading my mail now with IMAP. Slow, but sorta working.
Update (2:06PM PST): New update message. Still down, and now no ETA on being back up:
September 1, 2009 1:02:00 PM PDT
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 2:16:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.
Update: Google has posted to their blog:
We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.
I am getting sick of gmail crashing. it is happening more and more all the time. not good, Google!
Now if Google Voice were to go down for several hours like it did last year, the shit would really hit the fan.
I can send via gmail through my Berry..
Same here!
Can’t send through my G1 (android) !!
also not able to use my HTC Magic. The refresh icon is stuck in the top of the screen.
Me as well.
i haven’t noticed any issues with my BlackBerry as well and the phone app is working just fine.
same
I can send through my iPhone… and through my mail client… but can’t log on to gmail.com…
The Google Voice is up, but if you try to use it from the android phone it doesn’t work
It is pathetic to have a downtime in Gmail, but server crashes are of course unexpected. Gmail is an innovative mail service and Google apps are never secondary to any other service.
Then don’t use it
All mail servers tend to not have a 100% uptime and just like with thunderbird or outlook express (or whatever its called on the ms platform nowadays) you can still access gmail through google gears.
EXACTLY !! Free service and you expect no flaws
The flip side: the service isn’t worth paying for. If Google actually charged money for this crap, people would demand their money back.
yeah…
giving me free email
free searches
free document management
free access to a host of features
what a bunch of d**ks for having something go wrong and fixing it within a few hours.
louis ck is right, btw
Seriously, I’m reminded of the classic Louis CK interview about how people take things for granted.
http://www.yout...h?v=rOtEQB-9tvk
Welcome to working in the cloud everybody!!
Luckily when your corporate accounts are inaccessible all your competitors who are also in the cloud are similarly crippled.
Unless they’re using a provider that is more reliable, in which case you’re at a severe disadvantage…
Right, blame it on the cloud. But how often do you have a problem with your own desktop PC? No such thing as 100% reliability.
Yes and problems with my PC are prevented by using the cloud how?
Theyre not.
Touché
No, they are not – but using the cloud you can access all your stuff from another device
Hey, it’s a free mail service, some paid ones still going down once in awhile, stop complaining pal! you’re whinning like a stubburn beggar
you know how sometimes your car doesn’t start and you can’t get to work. stop complaining people. shit happens.
I had the anti-whiner brigade – theyre present at every single outside client-facing service outage, and theyre always telling us not to complain when X service goes down.
You dont get it – its our JOB to complain. I have enough idiotic clients who want to outsource all their internal services to Googles ‘cloud computing – its so easy’.
Cases like these allow me to point out why an externally hosted service arent always the best places to put your data.
Except for the fact that internal services go down too, only MORE often. Your logic fails.
At least when an internal service goes down, you can do something about it. You can also prevent it in the future by taking appropriate preventative measures. When an external service goes down, it could be down for days without being able to assist in repair or do anything about it at all. Self service is far more reliable than cool outside services like GMail. I love GMail, but it’s not a “professional use” service. It’s a toy.
Agree .. it happens .. after all ppl who has created it are humans and err is to human .. even god sometimes do such things .. stop complaining guys .. have patience .. it happens .. we all make mistakes ..its just that ..not everyone knows abt it ..
Cheers,
Daina
“it is happening more and more all the time”
I’m sick of hyperbole and downright lies.
seiously, I use a Gmail platform for my work emial & I am losing business business because I cannot access my email…..
Maybe Bing.com will come out iwht a better email format….
Sure Grant… your wish is GRANTed.
Please crib more when ur BING/MSN goes down
I wonder how much of the problem is from the backscatter of spams. I had my inbox filled with about 200+ of these last night in a span of an hour as spammers used forged addresses in my domain name and I got replies back from every undelivered address or spam filter.
I have also been receiving blog registrations and spam from forged/nonsensical gmail addresses, so presumably Google mail gets a huge amount of backscatter everyday. Can that on its own overwhelm a mail system?
Why in this day and age people cannot agree on a standard for denoting backscatter so they can be filtered out early especially when there is a spam attack going on is beyond me. Every mail system seems to use its own $%#$% version of backscatter e-mail thereby guaranteeing that backscatter itself becomes a bigger problem than spam. Has the IETF become too impotent to do any standards anymore?
Does anyone know if Google are still having issues. I still cant login to mail 6 days later and the mail administrator believes it a big log issue
When I tried to login I get username and password not found but I havent changed my passwords. It was working fine until the outage
Would appreciate any help
Thanks
Andy
ya its crazy i cant do anything, i rely on it too much
I’m so stuck it isn’t funny. I need to send an email and can’t. Ugh
Oh no…tragic.
You may have to resort to…oh God no…using a phone!
oops can’t do that either, thanks ATT/iPhone
Go Buy a stamp! Send it snail mail! lol
You can get on through iGoogle. Add the Gmail Page to your iGoogle and you can use with almost full functionality.
Or any external client, iPhone/BB etc…
Ohh yes its gone big time….
Monitor status at http://www.goog...ppsstatus#hl=en
We’re also collecting user reports and monitoring Twitter activity at http://downrightnow.com/gmail – stop by and let us know if you’re still having trouble.
As today’s Gmail issues have shown, crowdsourcing is often the quickest way to find out about widespread service issues. It was several hours before Google acknowledged any trouble on the Apps Status dashboard.
It stopped working for me about 2:30 Central Time. Normally I’m a huge proponent of Google apps, but I must admit this has me thinking.
I wonder if similar services run by Microsoft would have the same problem?
msft sucks
Yes, but you’d never get a straight answer from them about what, why, and when.
I wonder if you have a functional brain.
yup down for me too…but TC is getting so real-time lol
true true… one of the very few things still to cherish at TC
well since it stopped me from doing what I was working on, I had no option other than to fire up a post bitching about it.
IMAP and POP are still up… only webmail is down.
Now trying to remember the settings I had, I want to be able to grab them while keeping a copy at Google
SMTP: smtp.google.com
(TLS, port 557, enable authentication)
IMAP: imap.gmail.com
(Enable SSL, port 993)
login: user@domain.com
IMAP will not remove the emails from the server and will sync all changes.
Web Gmail seems to be back up
Confirmed, stop the panic, it’s back.
It just went down for me now. Wasn’t down earlier today, but it seems like it’s up and down. Google docs is working, though.
-matt
Wahhh. “gmail” is getting about 1000 new updates every 10 seconds over on Twitter.
Side note: Twitter is doing link-redirection (that TC wrote about) again. The link to this post went to http://twitter....22b1053235d9f46
Looks like I should just call it early today lol. When Google mail goes down, work cannot continue!
gmail sucks
thank you, very much for allowing me to view your scintillating comment
+1
Gmail and 3 different Google Apps accounts are down for me. This is when Thunderbird is helpful to put emails in outbox for later delivery!
You can probably send from there — POP still seems to be working.
One of several downsides of completely giving your life to one company in the cloud….what’s your fallback? Funny how this didn’t seem to happen as often when Gmail was in beta.
+1
hahahahaha you’re right… they should “downgrade” to “Beta” state hahahaha
It works just fine. Use IMAP.
you guys can check the status at
http://www.goog...ppsstatus#hl=en
My apps for domain is down also. Scary how much I can’t do when it is down…
“for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change”
hahahahaha… and which is the estimate? Is the near future… an hour? a day? which is the frame?
Frustrating, yeah… it’s my “main account”… sigh.
I can handle a little downtime, as thoroughly as I use Google Apps. Stuff happens in the cloud — just like sometimes you get a virus, run out of battery, the OS crashes, or whatever in the “desktop world.” Nothing’s perfect.
What I do wish they WOULD fix is the constant reloading of gmail I have to do because of things hanging, not loading, etc, because of all the JS!
wrong…
when your box goes down, it doesn’t take 100 others with it, or 10,000 others with it..
this is the thing that you guys forget when you hype up the “cloud stuff”..
on att/baby bells in the old days., they worked to 6 9s.. meaning that the phone system was up/running 99.9999% of the time…
not sure google is there yet…
i still prefer to have my apps under my control, where i have redundancy…
peace
Another win for cloud computing! See how much better things are now?
Time to consider Y! mail, atleast its more stable than Gmail
It is completely unreliable. I had scheduled a call & the phone no. is some where in the email.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
Thanks for the advice.
Also, I usually route my gmail to other accounts. Namely, I have a Yahoo! account where I can retrieve what I’m not able to access in gmail. This does suck right now, though.
Shut the fuck up!
We don’t like the fact that our emails are locked up in gmail, can’t send or receive.
If your ass stopped working would you just stop using it, stupid mother fucker!
exactly – so you should sit and wait.
> We don’t like the fact that our emails are
> locked up in gmail, can’t send or receive.
You chose to use a free service that is multiply-disclaimed (and still marked as Beta) for production use.
If you don’t like the fact that your emails are locked up in gmail, make a local copy. If you don’t like the fact that you can’t send and receive, invest in running your own mail infrastructure.
If you don’t want to because the cost/benefit analysis doesn’t indicate that you should bother spending money duplicating what you can get for free, that’s a perfectly fine business decision.
But Google is not your IT staff. You don’t pay them. They owe you nothing (this is, in fact, the agreement that you signed off on when you opened the account). Displaying rage at your IT staff when your equipment is broken is bad enough; complaining about free services belies your own responsibility in the decision-making process.
Gmail hasn’t been in beta since July. I’ve read this comment in several places and it’s wrong every time… http://gmailblo...ck-to-beta.html
Tip: Install gears and Gmail offline–then at least you have access to your old emails.
Why would you not keep important things from emails in a spreadsheet or some other kind of document? Can’t always rely on webmail, no matter how reliable it normally is.
Seriously! Of course people believe that “locking” their social networking sites keeps their info private, too. And that emails are safe communication venues. Obviously the internet is infallible and backups are unnecessary!
Use IMAP or POP and stop whining. This way you get a backup of all your emails and get to keep using it during webmail outages.
I don’t get this whole hysteria about Gmail locking your email, the tools are out there. If you’re lazy that’s another issue.
This seems to be a bigger problem than the one we had earlier this year…
And yet again a shining example of why “the cloud” will never replace proprietary business infrastructures.
So ‘proprietary business infrastructures’ never have down time, server crashes, etc, etc?
When a business server goes down ETA is never “in the near future”
Yeah, when my company’s servers go down it’s “Go away, we’re working on it.” and they stop answering the phones.
Far future then ?
Let’s face it, even though Gmail might have these infrequent outages it’s still far more reliable than something in-house, prone to hardware failures. Try to get the same stability for big businesses with thousands of employees. It’s also a lot cheaper.
Wrong .. if you have a properly configured Exchange environement (over 25k seats here) you lose nothing if you have a box go down as another box takes over. We put up close to four 9’s and the only outages we occur is for patches and weekly reboots. (knock on wood)
Gmail is cheap for BASIC service if you want the same level of service and need archiving it quickly adds up to what an exchange CAL costs.
If you engineer your email infrastructure properly you mitigate any risk through your DR / business continuity planning .. but I guess most people on here have no clue about enterprise email.
No, they give you a time they know they’ll never be able to meet. Google is at least honest about the realities of IT issues.
Something do with the new ad campaign to “go google”?
It’s back. For a free service, you complain a lot.
Still dead 4 me.
IMAP is working fine for me!
Gmail is down in France too since 1 hour now !!$?$!
the downside of relying on the cloud
if it rains, you will get soaked
Down for me too!
still down
damn its down for me………..
not a good signnnnnn i access all my mails frm gmail ..
yeah my school (university of alabama) runs the school email through google as im sure many schools now do. and my school email is forwarded to…guess what, my personal gmail account LOL this sucks i need to use it
Eh, stuff goes down once in a while. Not the end of the world. Considering the up time and the fact that gmail is a free service (and so is apps for some accounts) this isn’t a big deal. I doubt they’ll have it down for more than a few hours.
Ever since they removed the “beta” badge this has been happening more and more…put it back!
makes you re-thing using gmail for everything…
Then don’t use it.
1. He/she didn’t even say they use gmail.
2. You’re a douche.
I like how the google chat widget says “Unable to reach Gmail. Please check your internet connection.”
No, YOU check your internet connection.
Lol. Gmail isn’t working right now and I’m in the process of a business transaction. Oh man Oh man.. Effin’ GMAIL.
+1
hahahahahaaaa
^.^ lol so nice of you Davebroham
That’s exactly what I thought!
thank you.
It does suck but it’s free and it’s still the best damn email client in the world, so I’m willing to put up with downtime here and there. There is some shit I need to take care of right now that I can’t without access to Gmail, but I’ll manage.
Compared to what?
The best damn email client?
How about the easiest for a mouth breather to setup and use?
Working fine here in Portugal.
gmail is running on igoogle and seem to be running in imap connections
igoogle is only showing previously-cached emails, not currrent ones.
Yup, bad for my day’s productivity, since everything is on google, but then again quite good for tech crunch since i now have unplanned freetime in my afternoon!
Rackspace Mail, POP/IMAP/Exchange mailboxes hosted on your own domain, starting at just $1 per mailbox, with a 100% uptime SLA.
I can’t fathom why any business would use a free Gmail box for their accounts.
I use it because it’s the best damn interface for email, period.
amen
You’re a broken record. Stop spambotting.
Hush. He speaks the truth, and gospel of google.
It’s not just the free stuff that’s down.
The premium is down as well.
Because they are:
1) Cheap
2) Lazy
or the big
3) Stupid
Use it for your personal accounts, your facebook garbage, your wow account notifications – but using it for business purposes is spectactularly dumb.
No one’s ever really at 100% uptime. Would be interesting to see what Gmails uptime is currently.
Internally hosted services aren’t usually god in term of up-time either… In most company I worked in there were disruptions too…
So if you have a downtime, do you just reimburse the 1$… ?
LOL
Mine had worked just fine all day until you put this up. Now it is dead!
Yup down in chicago
It’s been down for me for about the last 20-30 minutes. It happens every once in a while. We haven’t seen a large scale outage in a while though.
Went down for me about 10 minutes ago (NYC).
Finally people can see the problematic side of SAS when the software resides out in the internet and not in the local office.
I have refused to embrace or offer to my clients this type of a solution since I saw the issues with a remote office service back a decade ago.
Last night I lost electric in my apartment, so I had no light.
Today, I read your brilliant comment, now I am switching back to candle and torch.
Down also. My personal Google Apps (although voice and docs still running), my company Apps, and 3 clients apps are all down. I personally have had no problems with Google till this point, although I don’t live on Google Apps as much as some (only check about 5 times a day).
Oh no! Google really, really let you down! Maybe you shouldn’t use all of their free shit to simplify your life.
Go back to listening to your emo-punk
Your trite attempt at pretentious pseudo-intellectual wit falls on its face when you consider that in fact there are paying accounts being affected.
Let me repeat this for you: PAYING CUSTOMERS ARE ALSO AFFECTED.
I realize youre really busy in between classes at whatever regional college art-school you belong to, but perhaps if you have nothing to add to the debate you should shrink back into your seat and shut up.
This made me smile.
ditto
Go back to listening to your “Beatles”.
Your trite attempt at pretentious pseudo-intellectual wit falls on its face when you consider that in fact there are paying accounts being affected. //using two $0.12 words in a row = pretentious
Let me repeat this for you: PAYING CUSTOMERS ARE ALSO AFFECTED. //ALL CAP, wow, you must feel good to be a paying customer
I realize youre really busy in between classes at whatever regional college art-school you belong to, but perhaps if you have nothing to add to the debate you should shrink back into your seat and shut up. //Non-doubt you were Ivy League educated – a degree in D*bagging?
Damn….its down and
I lost communication between friends
Now the site says “Service Outage”. That is REALLY not good given the trend of net-centric applications.
kill me it is not working