Google's hosted office suite Google Docs has been down for more than 30 minutes, rendering documents inaccessible and users frustrated. Short outages are not uncommon, but as the downtime extends this morning it seems a good time to ask - how long is too long for you? At what point would you personally deem a web service too unstable to use, and presuming that varies from service to service, what's your requirement for Google Docs?
Update:After 45 minutes of downtime, Google Docs appears to be back up.
While microblogging service Twitter has become the poster child of down time, few people rely on constant uptime from Twitter to do their business. Google Docs may be different, however. A growing number of people do business on Google Docs - should they?
To be fair it appears that Google Docs has only gone down longer than a few minutes a few times since the service launched. The service is generally very reliable, the collaboration features are useful and it's free for consumer use. If those few service outages cost your company a substantial amount of money or inconvenience, that may be too much down time though.
On the other hand, maybe serious business never had any place on Google Docs in the first place. What do you think?
We appreciate your input; this is an important question and reading your replies will give us something to do while we wait for access to our docs to return. We probably should have enabled Google Gears.
Comments
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Posted by: Marc Canter
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July 8, 2008 9:57 AM
I thought it wast just me and my lousy luck with Flash 10 beta.
Posted by: Josh Lowensohn
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July 8, 2008 9:58 AM
I am a bit impatient and can't go more than 3-4 minutes(specially if there is an urgent work which is halted)
Posted by: Prashant | July 8, 2008 10:39 AM
$0.00 = tolerance of 1 hour
$199.99 + cost of mandatory upgrades from forced obsolescence( Microsoft Office ) = 0.0000001 seconds of tolerance
Posted by: Todd | July 8, 2008 11:09 AM
I don't at all understand why the scenario of Google Docs being down is being considered so dire. No one is cut off from accessing any documents stored via Google Docs.
The fact is,Google Docs offers the opportunity for access off line via google gear directly from your hard drive available as an option in the top right hand corner of the Google Docs page.
https://docs.google.com/offlinehelp?hl=en
Posted by: msavoy
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July 8, 2008 11:21 AM
Depends on the timing... At the time when gdocs was down, it was not overly important for me to have it up so I didn't mind. If it was a time when I needed gdocs, I would have been very frantic.
Oddly, I had just tested gdatacopier a few minutes prior to the downtime. I got a little concerned that this had something to do with my gdocs being down and hadn't realized it was a larger problem. I was happy that I had at least a local copy of my documents. It really enforced to me that I need to get my backup plans going for my google accounts.
http://code.google.com/p/gdatacopier/
Posted by: josh | July 8, 2008 11:31 AM
Since I have Gears installed, my editing was not affected at all. I was even in a cooperative editing session when my partner found he could not do a save. I had him install gears right in the middle of the outage, and I saved my copy.
We synced right back up when Google Docs was back, I was never blocked from accessing or editing my document.
I was a very slick experience.
Posted by: Alan Wilensky | July 8, 2008 12:09 PM
Alan, that's one of the coolest stories I've heard in awhile. Way to go Gears, coming through in a pinch!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 8, 2008 12:20 PM
I can tell you users of SMB+ products that pay do have substantially higher expectations of uptime and performance.
Salesforce proved this out with trust.salesforce.com
We found we needed to copy it and provide 100% transparent uptime at well (at trust.echosign.com).
Posted by: Jason M. Lemkin | July 8, 2008 1:31 PM
You should ask the same question when you're in a traffic jam. How long is too long... every wasted minute is one wasted minute too much. But we understand that some things can go wrong so 45 minute downtime in one year is more than acceptable. If I count the hours solving IE CSS implementation bugs than it'll be at least one week of wasted time. Guess who's paying that...
Posted by: Bart | July 8, 2008 2:07 PM
Well, let's see, in 12+ years of using Microsoft Office I've had total downtime of ... 0 minutes.
Hmmm, that sounds about right.
Heck one of the reasons I have IE and FF is so that if some stupid update munges my browser (hello, you know who you are Mr. Yahoo Toolbar man!) I'll not be down for longer than it takes me to double-click.
-OT
Posted by: Oliver Taco | July 8, 2008 4:11 PM
I have to say that most of us who have worked with internal IT management tools, say a company intranet, know that an hour of downtime over the course of a year is, indeed, not the end of the world.
What I do think is of note here is that folks are upset (and justifiably so) over 1 hour of downtime, which shows us that standards and expectations for online services are right where we want them - very high.
Going to be interesting to see what the problem was and how Google addresses it.
-Kendra
Box.net
Posted by: Kendra | July 8, 2008 4:26 PM
Just last night I switched from google docs to zoho.
Motivated not for questions of slowness (though there has been a deceleration I would say) but for the following
- no functionality to attach spreadsheets to emails unless I missed that
- could not export a key spreadsheet (arrived as invalid file format)
- thirdly : the ongoing unresolved noname file issue (word docs sent from apple computers turn up in gmail as unreadable noname files : known issue for at least 18 months I believe).
PS am still a keen gmail user just less so
Posted by: michael mcwilliams | July 9, 2008 6:17 AM
Is RWW doing so badly that its editors cannot get Microsoft Office? It cost less than what a BS or MS level employee makes in a day.
If you're really that cheap: save on the iPhone and get a decent word processor with spelling, grammar checks and thesaurus for way less.
Posted by: Theresa Orlovsky | July 9, 2008 7:37 AM
I was right in the middle of an important report for work when it went down. So much for using online services for work stuff. It so messed up my rhythm, at least I got it back now - http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/google-in-error/
Posted by: Web Laureate | July 9, 2008 8:02 AM
Why hasn't anyone installed Google Gears. It will keep your documents in sync and allow you to work offline.
Another waste of a news story when Google provides a very good solution for times when the Internet is down.
Posted by: donv69 | July 9, 2008 8:19 AM