When Gmail Goes Down...

Yesterday, I had a meeting for about an hour so I was not able to check my personal Gmail for a bit. Neither was I constantly checking my work mail, which is based on Google Apps as well. That is why when I went back to my desk, I was quite surprised to see people lounging around just chatting, some looked kind of panicky and irritated at the same time. So what was happening?

I found out soon enough when I tried to send the minutes of the meeting through my Google Apps e-mail. At first I thought that the error I was getting was because of our Internet connection – it does become funky at times. Then I realized that everyone was experiencing the same thing. Pretty soon, I saw proof of the worldwide “blackout” on the Web – Tweets about Gmail were all over the place.

So what happens when Gmail goes down? The world comes to a standstill!

If you haven’t noticed, or you haven’t been keeping track, this is actually the 6th downtime in 8 months! That’s almost once a month of outage! For personal e-mails, I suppose that that is not such a big deal but if your work e-mail is on the line, then such a frequent occurrence is not a very good thing. Google has no explanation for the latest glitch as of yet but it has already been dubbed as “The Great Gmail Outage of 2009.” And great it was indeed – I lost about 2 hours of work time yesterday. What were you doing when it happened? How did you deal with it?