Google Gmail goes offline for over two hours

Not being able to get your email is not fun. Not being able to pick up the phone and scream at someone is a lot more painful for some people.

Our European offices are mostly on IMAP but a few brave users use the Gmail interface exclusively. Today at 9:30AM GMT, they were unable to log into their GMail accounts. Because everyone else was humming along (the Gmail outage only affected the web interface not the back-end POP3 and IMAP interfaces) on Outlook, Entourage and Mail.app, they didn't know what to do.

I don't wake up that early on the East coast of the US and if I did, I would have just told them to use another browser (sometimes cookie/cache conflicts can mess with GMail). The local tech support is just on board for Moves, Adds and changes so they were out of the loop as well.

Google posted a warning on their main blog (why not the Gmail Blog guys?) at around 4:28am PST saying they know there is a problem and they were working on it. A few hours later they posted a follow up to say that everything was alright (And you may need to use a CAPTCHA because of all of your failed login attempts).

Luckily, they were able to regain access to their Gmail accounts a little more than two hours after it started.

One thing that would have softened the blow of the outtage is offline access. I am testing this relatively new but useful utility. It basically pulls all of the Gmail into a Google Gears Database on your machine and allows you to read your email and queue up outgoing mails, just like a normal mail client when offline. GMail users who had this enabled may not have even noticed the outage.

Also, while GMail is my primary interface for my messaging, I have an Entourage account set up to pull my email. It may not be a bad idea to have this ready for your users should a similar problem arise in the future. If the Gmail account dies, they'll be able to pull up the backup email client.

Finally, it may not hurt to have a few links to the Google Blog and Gmail Blog on your Intranet so that they can find out if something catastrophic is happening. One of my users was smart enough to do this and alert the office.