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Gmail Suffers Two-Hour Failure

  • GigaOm, Tuesday, August 12, 2008 10:49 AM
"It's almost becoming routine, these outages at Google's Gmail service," GigaOm's Om Malik wrote after the e-mail service failed for a few hours on Monday. Yes, the entire system failed, which Malik points out is a massive problem for a company that plans to offer Web-based services to large corporations. "We aren't a large company but the losses are very real, especially in productivity," Malik writes. "If an outage of this magnitude can strike Google, the company with a fearsome infrastructure, I wonder who - if any - can plan for the worst."

Google is not alone in suffering outages. In recent weeks, Amazon's S3 and Apple's MobileMe service also failed, while Twitter seems to fail at least once a week. Perhaps we should be rethinking the idea of the Web as a reliable platform for computing services, Malik said: "Clearly a lot of work still needs to be done."

Later Monday, Google apologized for the outage. On the company blog, Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager said the issue was caused when the contacts system failed, preventing Gmail from loading properly. The problem was fixed at around 6:30 PM EST.

Read the whole story at GigaOm »

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