Gmail Goes Down - Twitter Survives
Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can't access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.
Google suffered a similar outage just last week, when a large number of users couldn't access their Google Apps and Gmail accounts, though this time, Google Apps seems to be running just fine.
Update #2: Google has now posted an entry on the Official Gmail blog, explaining that the outage was caused "by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly."
Twitter Keeps Humming Along
As quite a few users on Twitter and FriendFeed pointed out, maybe even more amazing than Gmail suffering a prolonged downtime was the fact that Twitter coped with the sudden spike in traffic very well. That, together with the fact that Twitter has already been quite stable lately, is a promising sign for a service that often went down at random times.
Today, at the height of the outage, Twitter's search returned close to 1000 updates with the word 'gmail' in it within less than five minutes.
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like for the 2nd part
Posted by: Dobromir Hadzhiev
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August 11, 2008 4:04 PM
Funny how this story could be a direct reply to a post Corvida wrote this morning:
http://shegeeks.net/why-twitter-has-failed-the-power-of-time-and-mainstream/
Clearly a marked occassion for Twitter.
Gmail has got a wide user base now and such problems affect the whole lot. Contrary to that, it can be said without any doubt that Gmail provides better service than other direct rivals like Hotmail (giant of one time), Yahoo (king of the past).
The other day, I was downloading MSN Messenger and it took hell of time due to congestion at MicroSoft Networks.
It is not to blame any company but to convey the message that such issues can happen to any online company.
i agree 100%
This isn't the first time, and it probably won't be the last time Gmail goes down. Remember, it's in Beta for a reason
We have 10 premium accounts and after getting locked out 24 hours- we see no email in the Inbox! A quick email to the Gmail team- and they say that they are working on restoring the emails.
One of our managers did not download the mails to his local machine and his entire Inbox with about 2 years of emails is missing- what is up at Google?
Gmail is very good:-)
Twitter is getting popular day by day ... Great news...
I took this post and delved further:
http://www.transparentuptime.com/2008/08/do-you-trust-cloud.html