Twitter alert to Gmail outage

(By Richard Holway 9.00pm 24th Feb 09) As I announced yesterday, I have joined Twitter as WiseGreyOwl as an experiment. I seem to have created quite a ‘following’ already. Bluntly, I am bewildered - 99% of everything I have read on Twitter so far has been banal in the extreme.

But something did happen on Twitter just after 9.30am this morning. Suddenly everyone seemed to be screaming that they couldn’t access their GMail accounts. I tried mine and they were right. GMail was down. The way the Twitterers dealt with this you would have thought the end of the world had arrived. Life as we know it ground to a halt. All they had left was Twitter!

As you can read in the FT GMail crash raises webservices fears, the outage lasted 2 hours, affected nearly 120m users and hit those in Europe worst as America was asleep at the time. Anyone would think this was the first time any webmail service or ISP had failed. My Tiscali mail account had a similar glitch on Friday and nobody even reported that. I’ve had so many glitches in the last 15 years since I started using email that I have a belt, braces and safety pin approach – diverting all my emails to three web mail accounts. Fortunately they have never all gone down at the same time.

The FT also states that the GMail crash is a body blow to Cloud. As in “Who would trust their computing to a service which goes down for two hours”. I’m not belittling it, but I wish my office PC had the reliability record of GMail. I even have all my data backed up in the Cloud and feel it is now a lot more secure than the physical backups I took before.

Doubters may seize on a 2 hour outage for their own reasons but Cloud is, in my opinion, an unstoppable force.

Footnote - Can someone explain to me why, after all this time, Google Mail still carries the suffix 'Beta'?