Gmail Recovers After 30 Hours

By: Jennifer Hong
Staff Writer
Published: Oct 18, 2008

The Gmail services by Google Inc were down for nearly 30 hours. Some Google Apps customers were also affected by the outage. Google said that the Gmail problem is fixed.

Google Inc faced some technical challenges this week after its Gmail services were down for nearly 30 hours. Google said on Friday that only a small number of Gmail users were affected by the outage.

Gmail is one of Google's most popular services. Google Apps administrators were facing high tensions at times. In some cases they had to deal with extremely upset CEOs and other high ranking executives who unable to access their Gmail accounts.

Google Apps is a suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications designed for workplace use. Its Standard and Education versions are free. However, many CEOs and executives use the service as an e-mail solution. These companies use the Premier edition which costs $50 per user and offers a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail.

While Gmail has been reliable, it also faced an outage in August. The first two outages occurred on August 6 and August 15 where it affected a small number of Apps Premier users and lasted over 24 hours. On August 11, Gmail was down for about two hours. In all three incidents, users were unable to access their Gmail accounts.

Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers who were affected by the outage in August. However, customers said Google could do a much better job at just notifying Gmail users of problems. The only problem with this is the e-mail notifications. If their primary e-mails are with Gmail, there's no way the company can notify unless the account holder has setup a secondary e-mail account outside of Gmail.

Despite a few hiccups with the Gmail service, most customers are satisfied with their Google accounts.