Gmail outage hit Google Apps as well
The problems that put Gmail out of action earlier today also meant some users of the subscription-based Google Apps service were left helpless. The outage may spark the first compensation given to paid customers.
The commercial version of Google Apps, which cover the mail service, calendar, documents and website features, promises subscribers 99.9 percent uptime across each month. Assuming that’s done on a calendar month basis, then during February the service could only by offline for 40 minutes, a limit that appears to have been broken this month.
According to Google’s terms and conditions, that would mean customers get three days added on to their subscription as compensation. There would be extra compensation if the total outage during the month totalled around 6 hours 40 minutes, but that seems unlikely to be the case given this issue lasted around two-and-a-half hours.
The two outages appear to be directly related as the Apps log-in system is routed directly through Gmail itself. There was some confusion with the Gmail outage as, towards the end of the problems, some users were able to see new e-mails arriving through third-party software such as Gmail Notifier, but couldn’t get into the system itself. That may have simply been down to an excessive demand on the Gmail site once word spread that it was back in action.
If there’s any positive Google can take from the outage it’s that it unintentionally served as a good advert for its recently added offline Gmail feature. That doesn’t help with sending or receiving messages or accessing attachments you haven’t downloaded, but it does go some way towards easing the problem of previously read messages being unavailable.
Google has advised users that they may be asked to complete a CAPTCHA (typing in a word or number from a box) before accessing their e-mails for the first time after the outage.
Related Posts:
