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Google Gmail Down - Service Outage?

Published on March 1, 2009
Tags: Web Hosting

On 24 February 2009 at approximately 10am GMT we lost access to Google Gmail. We have an office in Greece where I'm based and Gmail was completely inaccessible. All other sites we access were fine. I then remote controlled onto a couple of servers we have in London, UK and tried from there. Both came back with identical messages; server error.

So, is the outage due to a Google Gmail issue on a large scale, or possibly due to ISP / routing problems? I've raised the issue with an account manager we have at Google, and if / when I hear more, I'll post it here for you!

11am GMT, 24/02/09 Update: PocketLint posted an article regarding the GMail downtime, and comments to the article appear to suggest this is a global problem affecting the Gmail site but not direct access via desktop email clients.

12.30pm GMT, 24/02/09 Update: Service appears to have been restored now, although no notification for the outage has been provided by Google.

More generally, as cloud computing and software as a service become ever more popular, one must wonder; is there a higher duty of responsibility and care upon service providers to ensure 100% uptime because we, as end-users / clients, trust our businesses to them?

By Chelsey Evans

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