The Great Gmail Outage (GOOG, YHOO, MSFT)

If you have ever relied on any outside service to host your email or if you have ever had your email even routed from an outside service, there is the occasional outage.  It is this occasional outage that occurs in the tech world that can become ‘outrage’ if it becomes persistent or routine.  And a partial to full outage is what is happening with Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and its widely used Gmail service today.  The service has been acting slow today and there was a TechCrunch article this morning complaining about service errors.  While we have been able to use it, the service is currently down.  It is down on the open public Gmail and on the corporate email hosting used by an endless number of small businesses.

So that is happening today.  As of 4:20 PM EST for sure, and for a period before that the service was entirely inaccessible.  As of 4:30 PM EST it is coming in and out but is not working properly.  Unfortunately, this has been seen in the past for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) in both its MSN and Hotmail accounts and has happened with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) in its Yahoo! Mail.  It is not good.  It costs productivity and its costs time, so even if a transaction is not dependent upon it it costs money.

It is unfortunate when email goes down.  It could be a web attack, it could be a loop of the email spamming that shuts down the system, or it could be 100 other issues.  About all you ever hear of it is “temporary technical issues.”

JON C. OGG
SEPTEMBER 1, 2009