Gmail Outage Likely Hit Several Million on Thursday

[Brink]

Google's Gmail webmail service was unavailable for more than 90 minutes on Thursday, an outage that may have affected almost 4.8 million users.

Google first acknowledged the problem around 11 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, and declared it resolved at 12:40 p.m., saying it had affected "less than" 1.38 percent of the Google Mail user base.

Assuming the outage hit 1.37 percent of Gmail's approximately 350 million active users, then the total number of affected users would have been about 4.79 million.

Users impacted were unable to access their Gmail accounts, according to the Google Apps Status dashboard.

Read more at:
Gmail Outage Likely Hit Several Million on Thursday | PCWorld

 

[Trucidation]

Interesting. And presumeably all those services tied (read: forcefully welded) to Gmail like YouTube, you couldn't log in there either, so you were shut out from all your subscriptions, favourites, etc?

There's a phrase for that. "Single point of failure".

 

[pparks1]

While a 90 minute outage is rather long, it only affected 1% of the userbase....so 99% of users survived this "single point of failure".

 

[Urthboundmisfit]

Google's Gmail webmail service was unavailable for more than 90 minutes on Thursday, an outage that may have affected almost 4.8 million users.

Google first acknowledged the problem around 11 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, and declared it resolved at 12:40 p.m., saying it had affected "less than" 1.38 percent of the Google Mail user base.

Assuming the outage hit 1.37 percent of Gmail's approximately 350 million active users, then the total number of affected users would have been about 4.79 million.

Users impacted were unable to access their Gmail accounts, according to the Google Apps Status dashboard.

Read more at:
Gmail Outage Likely Hit Several Million on Thursday | PCWorld

Things that make you go Hmmmmmm....

 

[Gordon Simmons]

The same thing happened a couple of weeks ago! and Hotmail has had how many outages? does any have numbers?

 

[galaxys]

Yep, repeat. Didn't affect anyone I know.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
I love these statistics -- yes it might only be 1% of the entire user base but if YOU were affected then as far as you were concerned the effect is just the same as if a total Planet Wide outage had occurred.

I think this shows the futility of people totally relying on these types of services where they have absolutely ZERO control over the quality of delivery.

I have to say that Google considering the numbers of users does a remarkable job with this sort of stuff -- which is Free also to the end user but people should be aware that this type of service is always likely to suffer from unpredictable outages -- should be a warning to those advocating 100% "Cloud based" services too.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[lkgriffith]

It is always foolish to rely on someone else to provide a critical service for free. Such things can become very costly.

 

[F5ing]

Hi there
I love these statistics -- yes it might only be 1% of the entire user base but if YOU were affected then as far as you were concerned the effect is just the same as if a total Planet Wide outage had occurred.

I think this shows the futility of people totally relying on these types of services where they have absolutely ZERO control over the quality of delivery.

I have to say that Google considering the numbers of users does a remarkable job with this sort of stuff -- which is Free also to the end user but people should be aware that this type of service is always likely to suffer from unpredictable outages -- should be a warning to those advocating 100% "Cloud based" services too.

Cheers
jimbo

+1. Especially for that cloud based comment.