This past Tuesday a Gmail blackout left about 113 million users with no access to their email account for more than 3 hours.
The explanation of the incident was due to a spillover effect of a crash in one of the European data centers during a routine maintenance causing unexpected overflow over other data centers. While the other sites were supposed to cover the damaged software center, the final result was a general crash down with over 3 hours of worldwide blackout.
Today Google's Gmail is the 3rd most popular web email service after Hotmail and Yahoo, with 283 and 274 million users respectively. But Google is not offering only an email box; this outage had other serious effects from simple communication to business and various activities. Many users were completely stuck, not only accessing their emails but also documents, data and software applications.
Google has been developing extensively numerous online based alternatives applications to compete with Microsoft Office desktop applications. Most of the services are free, but advanced applications are also offered under payment fees. Numerous individuals and businesses already switched to Google’s web based services, such as Google Apps, replacing conventional desktop email and software. Users can work on documents collaborating instantly online with Google docs, as well as share calendars, messaging and chat with the other Gmail services.
This is not the first Google blackout…in year 2008 according to Google, the mail service suffered on average 10 - 15 minutes of monthly downtime. The last serious outage in August, when email service went down for about 90. Last January instead a blackout of Google search engine left internet users lost on the web.
Perhaps people believe that Google is infallible and only when it goes down we realize how today business and communication is internet related and internet dependent.
Isabella
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