For Gmail to go down for nearly two hours yesterday was clearly a significant PR blow. But the company’s handling of the incident has been more impressive than much online coverage would suggest.

Read some of the stories today and you’d think this was the biggest technological disaster of our age and the end of cloud computing. That’s quite the response to an e-mail service being briefly unavailable.

It’s also an example of the way media reports are affected by the experiences of the writers. Just a few years ago, contractors mistakenly cut through a major communications cable in the city I lived in and some people for miles around were without any form of landline phone or Internet for several days, during which most ATMs were out of action and many shops couldn’t process card payments. The incident received virtually no national media coverage simply because it didn’t affect journalists based in the capital, London.

But when a comparatively minor blip with Gmail occurs, virtually every online journalist is either affected or knows somebody who is, meaning it earns hostile coverage far beyond its true importance.

A fair few reports also include that new journalistic trick: scouring Twitter to find outraged comments which can then be portrayed as “the online response.” In reality, most of the Twitter posts I’ve seen on the subject have been exchanges along the lines of “Is it just me?”/”No, it seems to be everyone” rather than hostile rants.

Ironically Google used Twitter itself to keep users regularly updated about the problem. It’s also published a blog post which deserves praise as a model of customer relations. As well as acknowledging the seriousness of the problem, it’s got an explanation of the causes of the outage and the steps the firm will take: an explanation which provided plenty of technical detail in a form even the most casual computer user can understand.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 1:23 pm under Google.

Read more entries by John Lister.
Stumble It!