Gmail Goes Down for Halloween
Gmail users experience service issues throughout the weekend.
We had a very happy Halloween but the candy-filled festivities were slightly marred by a Gmail outage that saw a some users without service for much of the weekend.
While Google now says that the number of users affected was less than 0.001 percent, that assurance did not come until nearly 7 p.m. on Sunday. Most affected users began to experience problems on Saturday, and according to complaints noted by PC Pro, some of these problems lasted "more than 30 hours," with emails to Google going unanswered.
Despite Google claiming that this outage has affected only a very small number of people, it seems users are more annoyed with the lack of support than the problem itself. UberGizmo reports that people who paid for 24/7 phone support were unable to contact Google’s phone support. These people are understandably upset, given that they're forking over $50 a year to make sure they can get support over the phone when they need it.
"I'm in London, have had no access now for roughly past 24hrs," claimed one user, according to PC Pro. "Have filled in a support form to Google with an alternate email for them to contact me on but no reply yet. This is really bad! I urgently need to access my mail for work now."
Did you have any problems with your Gmail over the weekend? If so, let us know if you contacted Google and if the company got back to you.
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Umm...its a free service. They are literally giving you email, hard drive space, and a myriad of other great services (docs, voice, sms, chat, etc.) that most people could never implement on their own...for free. If they go down forever...guess what, it didn't cost you a cent. If they are down for a few hours, it still cost you nothing, and you should feel blessed to have it at all. Lots of complaining from people, not a whole lot of support for Google. You probably shouldn't be using a personal email account for work anyway. In many companies, at least states-side, that's a violation of ethics, and if you were running for political office, its illegal to conduct official business through personal accounts.
I contacted Google weeks ago, and haven't heard a thing back from them. It related to the Snow Leopard Gmail issue. If i never do, tough luck. They gave me email I can access 99.999% of the time, and a huge amount of storage (as it relates to email) for absolutely nothing I did or paid. Pretty good deal. I think people need to understand that, and be patient. I'm sure they do their best to remedy major problems as expediently as possible. I bet gmail doesn't go down and they just shrug their shoulders and walk off. They probably get some pretty highly trained, very capable individuals on it to fix it ASAP. Just be thankful you get free email at all, whether it's hotmail, yahoo, gmail, whatever else.
To the above commenter, I think you missed this bit 'These people are understandably upset, given that they're forking over $50 a year to make sure they can get support over the phone when they need it.'.
But on a side note, you shouldn't use Gmail for business use.
To the commenters above... Seems like google guarantees 99.9% uptime according to their website. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en [...] =catch_all
+1 to 1ppl1j34325rwefwfsfsa etc, it's my favourite free email supplier. Sure it goes down for a short while every few months or so, but it's free, who gives a damn.