When clouds fail

From Sysomos comes a comment on yesterday’s major outage that struck GMail (on No Google day no less). The outage yesterday lasted 1.2 hours  comments on Slashdot

JacobSteelsmith was one of many readers to note an ongoing problem with Gmail: “As I type this, GMail is experiencing a major outage. The application status page says there is a problem with GMail affecting a majority of its users. It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours (no, not a typo on my part). However, email can still be accessed via POP or IMAP, but not, it appears, through an Android device such as the G1.” It’s also affecting corporate users: Reader David Lechnyr writes “We run a hosted Google Apps system and have been receiving 502 Server Error responses for the past hour. The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well, making it difficult to coordinate.”

Besides people being frustrated, disappointed and angry. The outage illustrated the weakness in cloud computing.

This is the third GMail outage this year (A major outage in February and 20 minutes in May) and after returning online Google said: “We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.”

Despite the outage today, the sentiment (via Sysomos MAP) for “GMail” today from the social media landscape was 36% positive, 44% neutral and only 20% negative.

Below is the BuzzGraph generated from MAP that shows the major keywords today for “GMail”gmail buzzgraph.jsp