Article By: Joshua 'The Red' Russak (Red@aclion.com)
You may be asking yourself, "yea, like that would ever happen!" Well, guess what? IT DID! And if you don't believe me, check out these three articles:
- GigaOm Article: Gmail’s Out…Again
- Reuter's Article: Google Gmail users have trouble accessing accounts
- ZDNet Article: Gmail locks out users for an hour
According to Reuters (a reliable source) "Users across the United States, Canada and India reported problems with Gmail and a Google employee also reported that the company's own corporate e-mail account was down." The problems started at about 5 p.m. EDT (and around 2:30pm Pacific Standard Time here in Seattle, WA.).
And it seems this isn't a one time occurance. Quoting GigaOm, "in recent weeks, not only Google’s services but those of Amazon’s S3 and Apple’s MobileMe have gone on the blink, leading us to rethink our assumptions about the reliability of the web as a platform. Clearly a lot of work still needs to be done."
So what did you do during "the G-Crash"? Well, considering this may happen again, I suggest you come prepared. I call out to all of you Gmail, GApp, Googler Lovin' Hippie Geeks...stand tall and heed my words of wisdom...
Here are your "Top 5 Things To Do When Google Shuts Down":
- Take a nap and when you wake, hope the world hasn't collapsed into itself.
- Revert to your SmartPhone in hopes that it has found a loop hole during these depressing moments of your internet life
- Pick up a newspaper and "read it".
- Oh wait, Blogs still work so there's no need to go to such lengths...I suggest www.RedRussak.com
- If you made it this far, I'd assume that Google's 19,604 full-time employees and $23 Billion have come up with a solution.
...I'm glad we made it through these tough times. It's funny, I can't imagine what would happen if Google decided to take a vacation for longer than 5 minutes. That would make for a great blog post :)
