Gmail outages are rare

I was chatting with a friend based in Japan last Tuesday when suddenly GTalk – Google’s instant messenger service, which is linked to Gmail – suddenly went down. I thought it was an Internet line problem but when I messaged my friend through the phone, she said Gmail was down in Japan too. Could it be a global outage?

Turns out it was. A quick check of Twitter and tech blogs confirmed that everyone, everywhere was affected. Gmail users around the world saw a “502 server error” message when they tried to check their mail during the outage period, which lasted about two and a half hours.

“We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could,” Gmail Site Reliability Manager Acacio Cruz said in the official Google blog. “Obviously we're never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence.”

When things like this happen, it reminds us just how vulnerable we are due to our growing dependence on cloud computing (services offered through the Internet). One of the earliest manifestations of cloud computing is webmail.

Google came late into the game with Gmail but has amassed a creditable 113 million users, making it the world's third most popular webmail service, after Hotmail's 283 million and Yahoo's 274 million users.

As to be expected, there was a lot of criticism that flowed in the following hours and days after the outage. What critics should realize is that the downtime was not very long and that outages actually very seldom occur.

In the past six months prior to the latest outage, there were five other occasions when Gmail was unavailable for one reason or another. That’s not a whole lot. To be honest, I didn’t even notice any of the previous five. I must have been offline when they happened.

Google says that its Gmail service suffers from about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, given it an average uptime rate of 99.9%, which is good by any standards.

So, while it’s natural to gripe and complain about cloud computing services – and even to talk about gloom and doom scenarios like “What if I have an important article to send in by e-mail and Gmail is down for three hours! – it’s important to remember that a 99.9% uptime service record means that downtime is in fact, a very rare thing.

Even electricity, water and telephone services have downtimes. And not to mention, Internet access too has its share of downtime. Why should Internet services be an exception?

Outages will happen with any service. At the end of the day, Gmail and GTalk are great services – and they also happen to be free. Yes, we have a right to complain when service is not up to par but we should also be thankful for the times when they are up and running smoothly.