Gmail went down today at 0942 and was back up at 1046, according to Google (Google Mail - Service Details). Google says the outage affected less than 10% of their user base, with some estimating it at 1.5%. Assuming 350 million Gmail users, that's 5.25 million people affected. Not good!
Here is a chart from Wikipedia on Gmail outages since 2008:
The last major outage affected 1.5 million users in February, 2011. I'm pretty sure that even with the 6.3 million users affected in 2011 and today Google is still hitting their uptime requirement of 99.9%. Hence our continuing to promote Google and their business products.
Last week one of our VOIP vendors, Next Level Internet, was down for part of their client base for about an hour because their data center was struck by lightning. The air conditioning quit working and when the temperature reached 130 degrees they shut down some of their servers to prevent long-term damage. During the Southern California blackout last year Next Level stayed online by cutting to their backup generators. They are now looking for backup solutions for a loss of only AC in the data center.
As unhappy as we are with these outages, we're still happy to recommend both Google and Next Level Internet. They're still two of the most reliable, cost effective technical options out there for small business.
We would be - and will be - much more concerned if these issues resulted in a loss of data or become more frequent and widespread. For now, Google (and Next Level Internet) still beat or meet their competitors in like functionality and uptime.
Visit On-Site Technical Solutions for information on how you can move to Google Apps or other Cloud Computing applications. Call us for all of your network computing and business IT needs. We can also help with your data security and mobile computing. Follow us online below. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168.
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