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on Aug 11, 2008 | hide | past | favorite



"your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors"

Is it just me or is this error message a bit annoying b/c it casts blame on my account, as if it's something I did.

how about "Gmail is having a problem".


"The particular node of our server farm that your account is hosted on is currently experiencing errors" sounds a little too technical to me. Also, "GMail is having a problem" might lead them to believe that, say, if they send email from their hotmail account to somebody else's gmail, they wouldn't get it.


Better & more direct would be "We're having problems with your GMail account"

That way they take responsibility for it, rather than blaming the user, or blaming no one.


I like it, hopefully someone from GMail sees this thread.


that's true, that is a good point.


once you have paying customers it's hard to say those things :-)


Google does have paying GMail customers. It's $50/user/year for business class GMail.


Customers pay with Google now, supplying them with private information and attention for their advertisements.

This is the same model almost every magazine and newspaper, where the cover price merely offsets a portion of the printing costs.


https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ works


Maybe they are patching the cookie security bit vulnerability that was disclosed at DEFCON.


My address bar says http, so no, doesn't look like it.


not for me.


try: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

Note the trailing slash!


ah thank god. I've been waiting for an important (time sensitive) email, but have been unable to access my account for a while.

Thanks for the hint.


Now if only I could also send that email I really need to send ...


seems to be back up now.....


@ 3:30PM PDT

Looks like it's back up. There was a similar problem that affected my Gmail account last week. But it only occurred when viewing specific (older) emails. This problem seemed to affect everything.

It's disconcerting that it went down twice in the last week and with very little communication from Google as to what's happening.


Well it IS in beta :)


I have Google Apps and it is down too. One of the reasons I pay $50/year is for uptime....


They guarantee 99.9%, so they get almost 9 hours a year to screw up. ;)


I knew I should have stayed on my premier edition..


Eh? I am talking about premier. It's 99.9% for premier and uh ... 0% guarantee for anyone else.


IMAP seems to be working fine, just the web interface is out.


never mind, IMAP is gone too.


I made a tribute to the day's events: http://chrisricca.com/failfrog


"Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes."

Wow! This is a first for me...


I googled the error and came up with this:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=troublesh...

Heh.


Yeah I have been booted and had to log back in and such but it must be down pretty hard for the moment.

Sucks because I was in the middle of sending a message and don't know if it went out or was even saved as a draft... I really should always write my email in emacs.


Yep, me too. I was just trying to send a bug report to one of my client's hosting providers about something they screwed up costing me an entire evening ... and now I can't even send the bug report! How ironic :D


The most interesting part of this is the explosive response on Twitter.


Perhaps we will now see a slew of articles complaining about Google's inability to scale.

Isn't Gmail just like an IM system? What's so difficult about that?

;)


> The most interesting part of this is the explosive response on Twitter.

That's the definition of irony. ;)


That is awesome, this is the first time I have really used Twitter.


http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail - leave it open and watch the refresh count. Pretty interesting.


It'd be awesome if the surge in tweets complaining about gmail going down, in itself caused twitter to go down... Domino rally anyone?


...and in response, 300+ bloggers would whip an already dead horse about Twitter and their uptime.


egads! 728 in the last minute...


I was just thinking to myself, surely Gmail isn't down. Then this popped into my GoogleReader. Good thing they're not running all their services from the same box. :)


http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/systemwide-gmail-outage...


Meanwhile, the productivity of 20 million people worldwide just spiked upward.

This is taken straight out of Onion News.


techcrunch was nice enough to credit me for the gmail fail whale image spoof I emailed them for the article. even though it's just one of many links in the article, still bringing in decent traffic today


Was talking to a coworker about the outage over GTalk and it suddenly went out as well, Pidgin is reporting 500 errors when trying to send messages.

Not a good sign.


Both my accounts are down, too. My whole afternoon's agenda today was email. Guess I'll compose some messages offline...


Second time this has happened to me in the last month. Last time it was a very brief outage (like 10 minutes).


I've definitely had this happen to me before on Gmail, this is the first time when it also seems to be happening to everyone.


If you have an iGoogle page with Gmail you can still get to your messages.


I'm still down and have been for at least the last 20 minutes.


AH... back online!


Not for me


Use HTML version for now: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/


All you can do is read, not send :\


I just sent one.


Try the html view, it worked for me:

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/


It's up for me, but I can't send any messages


Is this Hacker News? what have we become...


yeah I'm locked out.

"but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue."


I am wondering, what caused this ?


I caused it


Gmail is back already.


this is the first time google has made me doubt it's might


its, not it's


you are right thanks


it's back


GFAIL, by Google.


I'm sorry to hear gmail is down, but really what can you expect for free?

When the service was down for your email which your life depends on, where you able to reach someone to get support-- I bet that answer was a sad "no...". Oh yea, I forgot, you could go read the community forums...

Company's like TVC.Net, Godadd y and others offer email for a buck a month and you can bet had service been down with them you'd be able to at least call someone-- or even move your account quickly to another server and be back up in no time.

So do you depend on free and prefer the type of service you get with free?

At what point did businesses expect free would be reliable, and expect free customer support as well?

If you lost money due to using a free service methinks you only have one person to blame.

Enjoy, Jim




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