Gmail down September 1, 2009

Yes, Gmail was down today, September 1, 2009 for a stretch this afternoon. Really it wasn't more than about two hours at the most from what I saw and from what I hear IMAP/SMTP access was working although the web interface was down. I found out a few interesting things during the outage though. ...

1) Twitter is a good source to check if gmail is down.... The technologizer gives us this nifty twitter search to see if there's buzz about gmail being down.

2) Google has a nifty cool apps status dashboard where you can track ... well the status of google apps and when issues are expected to be resolved.

Really, let's face it google apps will go down from time to time just like any other piece of technology. They certainly try to minimize outages to gmail and other services, but things happen. I was expecting an email at the time or I might not have noticed the outage myself. So, I was logging into gmail to see if it was there yet and got the 502 error message and retried and retried and managed to see my inbox, but got the message that it had trouble communicating with google and then managed to see an email, but then it gave an error again, etc.

Tonight everything seems fine.