Earlier today I was using Gmail and had some trouble logging in. This was just before lunchtime here in Europe where I am currently living (before any decent waking hour in the U.S.). After being frustrated and checking all the usual suspects – connectivity, browser lockups, rebooting – I came to the conclusion that *GASP* Gmail is down!
Not one to cry wolf without first checking my facts. I wrote up a quick digg query and asked if anyone else had experienced a disruption of service. I then contacted my friends over at UK hosting company 34SP.com. It turns out that they had just alerted their hosting customers to the problem via a post on their blog entitled, Gmail Outage.
To summarize what’s know right now – the service is unresponsive in a wide variety of geographic regions – giving the appearance of a worldwide outage.
According to the blog post on the outage, ”34SP.com conducted extensive internal staff testing – both within and external to our firewall – and then sought outside confirmation that the service was indeed down. The URL: http://mail.google.com/mail/ remains unresponsive.
External sources reporting the outage at this hour include:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Gmail_Down_19 (my digg post on the outage)
and when searching Twitter for Gmail one sees the confirmation clearly:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail”
I can confirm that other Google services such as Google Analytics and Google Apps are still functioning normally.
Whatever the cause of this problem you can bet that it will be a VERY BIG deal for Google. It is extremely rare for the engineers at Google to have any unscheduled downtime in any service. But just as we all know in the web hosting business – nothing is ever immune to unforeseen difficulties – even Gmail.
If you are having similar problems with Gmail leave a comment with where you are geographically trying to access the service. Look for tons of press tomorrow (probably here on The WHIR) on what exactly happened.
UPDATE: Google is now admitting that something is wrong, ”We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.”
The live updates are being posted at: http://mail.google.com/support.
About Derek Vaughan
Derek Vaughan has been actively marketing on the Internet since 1995. His extensive online marketing experience includes the online direct marketing of books for $300 million per year NYSE traded book publisher Thomas Nelson. Mr. Vaughan also marketed products online at the Walt Disney Company as the online marketing manager of ecommerce for ESPN.com. He was also the marketing manager for the launch of the NASCAR Online Store in October of 1999.
More recently Mr. Vaughan turned his attention to online marketing for the Affinity Internet, Inc. family of companies - which owns a broad portfolio of web hosting brands. Additionally, Mr. Vaughan served as Vice President of Marketing for Aplus.Net and helped them establish a strong position in the web hosting field. Derek has also serverd as the VP of Marketing at HostMySite.com.
Derek Vaughan holds undergraduate degrees from both Indiana University and Purdue University, and has earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the Owen School at Vanderbilt University.
Through his theWHIR blog, Derek will touch upon online marketing in the Web hosting space, web hosting events and industry trends.
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