Some Google Users Face Outage for over 24 Hours

October 20, 2008 · Filed Under News · Comment

An unspecified number of Google’s Gmail and Apps cloud computing users suffered an extended service outage last week, with some saying that their businesses had been negatively impacted.

Last week, an alert appeared at about 2 p.m Pacific Time on Wednesday saying that “a small number of users” were affected by a problem in Gmail access. One and a half hours later another post announced that Google would sort out the problem by 6 p.m Pacific Time on Wednesday.

However according to many users of Gmail and Google Apps, the outage continued over more than twenty-four hours with several of them getting “502 Gateway errors” when they tried to access their accounts. It was especially bad for those Google Apps administrators whose companies had come to depend upon Gmail and Apps to run their businesses. Many among them complained in posts that had they known Gmail would be this unreliable they would have made alternative arrangements.

Some time after 6 p.m Pacific Time, on Thursday, Google announced that the problem had been fixed and that all services and applications were running smoothly as before. However Google did not reveal what had caused the outage or why it had taken the company so long to restore it.

Tags: gmail, Google users