Gmail Blackout and the Aftermath

The blogosphere calls it ‘GFail’ others ‘Blackout’, Google’s  3-hour outage really scared Gmail users after a software glitch crashed the service this past Tuesday.

A universe of 113 million Gmail users was left without any access whatsoever to their email accounts, which was thought to be a temporary thing, however, it lasted more than expected.

Consequently, Google offered its apologies as expected without giving much explanation to the cause of such crash.

Naturally, Google could not stay cross-armed after the incident and in response, it rolled out an Apps Status Dashboard, which offers performance information regarding all of Google Apps services, indicating the level of severeness of the issue at a given day (during an outage and after an outage) through a series of different icons.

As declared on the Google Incident Report, during the outage, Google will acknowledge the problem and provide the best estimate of when the service will be restored, plus offer possible solutions around the problem, if any. After the outage, Google will post an incident report explaining the exact causes of the problem and improvement actions.

The dashboard is a sort of administrative control panel that will help users monitor all of Google’s App services and  check for the status of individual services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Doc and Google Video for users around the globe.

As Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch explained, the dashboard is in line with other popular web  services and mentioned Twitter in particular, who also has its own dedicated Status blog update.

Check out some of the headlines that invaded the web in time of crisis during the  Google crash.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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