Okay, so I was as inconvenienced as anyone else during the GMail outage today, being part of our corporate GMail pilot. It had been on-off flaky during the day, then at 2 p.m. local time, just as a phone conference was starting up and I needed to open the PowerPoint file I’d received earlier … it seriously went away. There was one brief taunt of an “Urgent!” email from my boss, then it dropped back to a local offline listing, sans recent deliveries.
Rrg.
And ditto on my Blackberry. Double-rrg.
But, let’s be real here. These things happen. I’m sure Google is as robust a setup as you get with an online service, but services go down sometimes. That includes internal / local services and pay services. My personal ISP (who do a bang-up job) has taken hits before, sometimes lengthy. So have our internal company mail servers.
Nobody likes it, but anybody who uses the excuse to bash Google, or GMail being free, or cloud computing in general, has either an axe to grind or something to sell you.
Geez! I missed the whole thing! By the time I checked my email for the first time yesterday — at 10:30 pm, everything was great in Googleworld!