GMail Fail

Lots and lots of people were taken aback this week when GMail experienced a series of outages. The most pronounced was on Tuesday.

This was especially annoying for growing businesses who are very active on Twitter, due to the high level of feedback I read on there! These businesses went the cheap and best way and acquired licenses from Google for their suite of products that range from e-mail (G-mail) to word processing and spreadsheets (Google Docs).

I guess that 2 hour + long outages like what was experienced this week are a sign we're not all there yet on the cloud computing train, as it were.

Thankfully, and strangely enough, all the other Google family of products were functional at the time of the major outage. iGoogle, Google Documents, etc., were all up and running.

Apparently, what occasioned the outage was the maintenance of several servers, which occasioned the other servers to get overwhelmed and send traffic on down the pipeline, to other like-minded (programmed) servers who also experienced red line alerts and pushed the traffic downwards, until the limited available system resources just stopped traffic altogether to the GMail service. I'm sure that Google learned a valuable lesson!

I have been experiencing some long-term annoyance at the lack of features on Google Documents' word processing feature, and have been window shopping elsewhere. Recommendations indicated familiarity with OpenOffice, which is what I am going to try next.

I am always piqued by people's irritability at Google, in particular Cory Doctorow and @Fantomaster (Twitter handle) who always comment (Doctorow through his fiction) about Google's lack of privacy. I still haven't read about this issue, but it obviously is something I need to familiarize myself with because of the amount of content I have entrusted to Google, both in e-mail and document format.

Here's hoping big brother's behaving today.