It’s been a bad week for Google’s reputation and its customers’ nerves. Two separate outages left some Gmail users without access to messages for more than a day and Google Apps customers struggling to get past the service’s front page.

A ‘small number of users’ lost access to Gmail some time on Wednesday, with Google acknowledging the problem late that evening. The firm said most of those affected were back in action by Thursday evening, with access fully restored by early Friday morning.

Google hasn’t written anything about the issue on its official Gmail blog. Given that the blog has addressed previous outages, this may indicate it was a particularly small proportion of users affected this time.

As you may remember, Gmail was down for all users for a couple of hours back in August. That was hardly a major outage in comparison to many online services, though it did serve to remind users how reliant webmail is on actually connecting to the site, particularly given that most users can’t even access old messages during an outage.

The more serious problem is with Google’s paid mail customers, who get the service through the Premier edition of Google Apps. Both this week’s mail outage, and two separate incidents in August, only affected a small portion of users. However, as they pay a fee ($50 per user), they are understandably more indignant when things go wrong. The firm also faces problems because it advertises a guarantee of 99.9% uptime for paid users, meaning the service should be down fewer than nine hours a year.

The second issue this week involved the Google Apps service. According to PC World, a bug in Google’s system meant firms who’ve customized their Start pages found that layouts went askew, links stopped working and Gmail became erratic at best. The problems lasted from Thursday afternoon until Friday lunchtime.

In some senses, issues like this simply highlight how much many of us take Google’s web-based services for granted, particularly among business users. But as rare as such outages really are in the big picture, it’s understandable how upset people get – and none more so than corporate IT staff who find themselves berated by office workers but helpless to solve the problem.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm under Google.

Read more entries by John Lister.
Stumble It!