GMail Goes Dark

Did you notice? I did not. I don’t use Gmail unless it is to sign in to Blogger. But according to the New York Times, the Mighty Google Gmail system was down for the count Monday night.

One of the best places to track the outage is Twitter. Users are venting their frustrations about Gmail being down — at a rate of 100 or so messages per minute. As a user who calls himself dashmybuttons said, “it’s like a neighborhood blackout, now everyone’s out in the street trying to assess what went wrong.”

I called a Google spokesman, who said he would check and get back to me. For a company that is trying to pitch its Web applications to business customers, not to mention millions of individual users, this can’t be good news.

Someone in the comments made the good point: why would Google “have to go check”? Wouldn’t they already know if Gmail was down, IF Google was using it? It made it seem like Google doesn’t even use it’s own mail program! Funny. If I was Google, I wouldn’t. I’m not fond of Gmail; it’s clumsy and bulky. I only have Gmail because I have to in order to use Blogger (and now YouTube has included it).

Nonetheless, aren’t power outages expected? I think it odd that some people are angry at the outage, and especially for a free service!