Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

Google admitted that an outage last night to its Gmail service affected around 10 per cent of its userbase - in other words, around 30 million people were unable to access their email online. The downtime, according to the Chocolate Factory, lasted up to two hours for some punters. However, reports trickling into The Register …

[Anonymous Coward]

Chocolate factory mail melt down

Unable to send targeted ads for hours sobs google privacy haters

[JohnG]

Re: Chocolate factory mail melt down

It was the strain of all those Easter eggs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chocolate factory mail melt down

THIS IS WHY I DONT WASTE TIME ON THE INTERNET YOU GET USED TO USING SOMETHING AND THEN POOF IT DISSAP

[Scorchio!!]

Re: Chocolate factory mail melt down

Targeted ads? What targeted ads? I ain't seen no steenkun ads for years now. (Cheeky grin.)

[A Non e-mouse]

Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

Google says the outage affected 10% of those who tried to access their mail.

El Reg says that it affected 10% of googles user base.

Who says that 10% of googles user base were trying to access their e-mail at that time ?

[Anonymous IV]

6.45pm (Pacific Time)

Couldn't the author have gone to the effort of telling us what time that is in BST? It would save the rest of us having to work it out, or ignoring it.

[Stoneshop]

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

"Google admitted that an outage last night to its Gmail service affected around 10 per cent of its userbase"

Before you choose the Pedantic Grammar Nazi icon, make sure your pedanticity is up to scratch.

[mhenriday]

Reading comprehension ?

«We've determined that this issue affected less than 10 per cent of the Google Mail users who attempted to access their accounts during the affected timeframe.» What part of the above period, Stoneshop, do you not understand ? I suspect the difficulty lies in the subordinate (relative/dependent) clause («who attempted to access their accounts during the affected timeframe»). Such clauses usually appear in children's speech at around two years of age, but obviously they can occasion difficulties for the unwary ; I hope you will find the information found on this site ( http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateclause.htm) of help in dealing with complex sentences in the future....

Henri

PS : Pedantic grammar nazi, as I here presume that it was indeed a genuine misunderstanding of the grammar that lead you to post....

[DJ Smiley]

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

10% of (one day) = 2.4 hours

That does.

Service down time : 2.4 hours = 10% of users on average effected ;)

[I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects]

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

"10% of (one day) = 2.4 hours = 10% of users on average affected"

Nope.

2.4 hours is 10% of 24 hours; not 10% of the users.

[Scorchio!!]

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

ITYHBT!

HTH.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

Googles user numbers for Google+ are Lies, dammed lies

[AndrueC]

I'm smug, then. I do have a GMail account but hardly ever use it. I prefer to run my own email server (VPOP3 on Win7) and yes, I rely on POP3.

But..I've had outages of my own kit and they usually last at least half a day on account of not being willing to leave work just to fix it. EMail is useful but it ain't /that/ important to me. Schadenfraude in IT is usually inappropriate :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Schadenfraude in IT is usually inappropriate

So true. Whenever I read of an outage of the kind that could occur here, I resist the urge to smugness and instead make a small sacrificial offering to the IT Gods (they seem to be happy with a barbecued slice from the hide of the Marketing Director)

[Iad Uroboros's Nemesis]

hMailServer

Yup, I am a POP3 user too...but I use hmailserver rather than VPop3 (on Windows 7 too). A) because it's free and B) because it has never screwed up yet (after about 5 years' use).

[AndrueC]

Re: hMailServer

To be fair, VPOP3 hasn't screwed up for me either. Unfortunately a couple of years ago they revamped the UI and it went from being a paragon of ease of use (I'd even used it as examples in presentations) to being far less intuitive.

No what's screwed up for me is Windows Update (twice) and my SSD (fixed with a firmware upgrade).

[eulampios]

postfix MTA

Got postfix+spamassassin running on two machines with one relaying messages for another. One machine runs Debian, another -- Ubuntu. mutt is superb on both. No need for either imap or pop3, thanks to ssh. Never had any outages.

Besides that, do have two more gmail accounts through IMAP and mutt with about 7 thousand messages total. No problems with both either.

[eulampios]

Re: postfix MTA

Should have not bragged about it, since I (first time) can't now send messages to the outside world. My isp's smtp server is malfunctioning. And BTW, according to my message headers, it's a Microsoft shop.

[mhenriday]

Agree, Andrue, that Schadenfreude is inappropriate,

not least when it comes to IT. But the Reg - or more accurately, certain Reg bloggers, seem to have adopted «Schadnefruede ist die beste Freude» as their very own rallying cry, due, at least to some degree, to the fact that it tends to elicit responses from us suckers, who seem always ready to take the bait....

Henri

[Neil Barnes]

at time of writing it hadn't got back to us

Probably had a gmail account, then...

(the one with an envelope in the pocket, thanks!)

[nemo20000]

Related?

I’ve recently started receiving somebody else’s Gmail. Without naming the accounts in question, my example@... account is now also getting exam.ple@... mails.

Surely that’s not right.

[Vitani]

Re: Related?

That's a feature of gmail, you can send emails to example@ and put any amount of dots in there and it'll still get to you - e.x.a.m.p.l.e@ = ex.am.pl.e@ = exam.ple@ = example@

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Related?

If you read all the stuff Google tell you then you'll find out that john.smith, johnsmith, Jo.hnsmith etc. are all the same so if you had johnsmith then no one should have been able to sign up for any dotted version of it

[Anonymous IV]

Re: Related?

In the Google email address model [e-mail] can be written as [e-mail], or even [e-mail]. all full stops in the section before the @ sign are ignored...

[Andy_H]

Re: Related?

As I remember you can.

e.g. [e-mail]

joe.bloggs

j.o.e.b.l.o.g.g.s

etc

So you own them all, I remember reading it when setting up my account a while back.

[TheWeddingPhotographer]

remember Google calender?

That went tits up too, and for a lot of users never recovered

[mark l 2]

Im use thunderbird and IMAP for my gmail account and couldn't get on last night so when they said it wasn't affecting users of POP3 and IMAP it was down for me but my own IMAP server was working so i know it wasn't a network problem

[eulampios]

Same here with two gmail accounts via IMAP+mutt (with headers and msgs caching is akin to POP) on 2 machines. Very rarely do I have a "Server error" messages, when one account would get down for a few minutes.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

...at time of writing [Google] hadn't got back to us with [a] comment.

From which we can deduce that the problem's been caused by the Oompah Loompahs going on strike. (Orange flu?)

Mine's the half-height one, thanks.

[Iain Hamilton]

Imap was definately affected. I couldn't access my gmail account over imap for a couple of hours.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder

How many of those 300m GMail accounts are from people (like myself) who were forced to create one in order to post videos or comments on YouTube, but never use it for anything else (esp. email)?

[Wesley Wakeman]

Of the 300 million user base are all 300 million email users or are some email some apps etc?

[William Boyle]

X Sigma

Let's see. 10% x 120 minutes == 12 minutes of total downtime for Google's email customers. If that is all the downtime for a year, this is 5 sigma (more or less) uptime - a very good metric for web services! I deal with performance/reliability issues as a senior systems/performance engineer for a VERY large internet company, and we would be delighted to provide our customers with this level of service (I am working hard to get to 6 sigma - about 5-6 minutes of downtime a year).

[John H Woods]

Re: X Sigma

I'm confused - I thought sigma referred to standard deviations from the mean. Is it now also used as a replacement for the '5 nines / 6 nines' etc terminology that we used to use for uptime?

[DasBub]

Smudge mode

I was sure it said "smudge mode," implying that people had to start using smoke signals. I was going to give you cleverness points.

[diodesign]

Re: Smudge mode

It is a Red Dwarf reference.

C.

[phear46]

Re: Smudge mode

I can't believe you had to explain that....

[DasBub]

Re: Smudge mode

Yes, I got it, I just misread it at first.

And there will be no points awarded for Red Dwarf references... unless they're from the first four seasons.

[diodesign]

Re: Re: Smudge mode

I'm not enough of a RD nerd to know if that line is from S1-4, sorry.

C.

[VeganVegan]

Re: Smudge mode

What is Red Dwarf?

[Openminded Cynic]

Re: Smudge mode

Don't make me go all Ace Rimmer on your ass!