It’s back, and, as Sandy pointed out in her comment above, the apocalypse did not take place, despite a sense of doom that comes from being disconnected in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see why Gmail went down. It will also be interesting, with this being the latest example of a free service providing a service level commensurate with its cost, whether users with a need for reliable service with a real-world SLA will start wondering why they think free is the best way to meet their needs.
eaconsult
Enterprise Applications Consulting – Josh Greenbaum
It wasn’t just down for free users: I pay for Google Apps, which is how I run my email/calendar/contacts, but I also have IMAP and POP enabled on my Google Apps (and Gmail) account, which was working just fine. In fact, I didn’t know that there was an “outage” (mostly a web interface fail, not a a back-end server fail) until I saw all the Twitter noise about it, since I normally access it via an IMAP desktop client.
I’ve been in many corporate environments where an outage of MS-Exchange is not unheard of; considering that this was the first Google Apps outage in quite a long time, I’d have to say that its track record is considerably better than an Exchange server. The only difference is that when a company’s Exchange server goes down, the whole world doesn’t twitter about it.