2 hour Gmail outage Monday

Did you notice or were you impacted by this?

SmallBizResource Blog -- Internet

Did You Survive the Gmail Outage?

Posted by Gayle Kesten Tuesday, Aug 12, 2008, 09:50 AM ET

Memo from Google: We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.

As posted on sister site bMighty.com: "Gmail users were without their e-mail service for two hours on Monday thanks to a systemwide outage beginning around 2 p.m. PT."

The glitch, according to the Gmail Blog, "was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly...We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it."

Good to hear. The blogosphere seems to be going easy on Google as well. "In a perfect world of software as a service, downtime exists as a curious idea, something people hear about but never actually see. The world is not perfect, and neither is SaaS," wrote WebProNews' David A. Utter.

Over at Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker said that coverage of the outage (say that 10 times fast) goes to show just how popular the free service has become among users. "If GMail had gone down a year ago, would anyone have really cared? Possibly a handful of search bloggers and other Googlephiles, but the service goes down from here on out, and it's world news. Another sign that Google has excelled yet another appliance beyond search and the business world has reacted favorably by becoming dependent upon it."

More to his point: "This morning the problem was the most searched-for term on Google, with five of the top ten searches referencing the issue," reported the HeraldSun, whose local Australian readers pretty much slept through the whole event.

OK, it's Tuesday now and we all live to tell. Were you and/or your business negatively affected? Can you forgive Google this service transgression?

Original post here.