Tuesday, February 24, 2009

GMail's Lights Just Failed

It’s alarming how things just fail. When it’s the car or something in the home or office, we invariably utter some choice words and move one, but when its our conduit to the word we not only notice it, but count the minutes back to reality.

Tuesday was a black day for Google. No their shares didn’t drop into freefall, their search engine didn’t link to all the sites it wasn’t meant to, but the impact was as huge. The world of Google mail went offline for around four hours! A few years ago we would not have thought much of a four hour reprieve from the constant flow of email, but today is different and we are all programmed to read and react to its persistent prods and questions.

According to ComScore more than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, making it the third most popular mail service behind Hotmail and Yahoo. Over a million business around the world use Google's professional office suite of applications, which includes e-mail. So the lights went out for many but did they notice and what was the true impact?

The Google Mail support page said "A number of users have had difficulty accessing GMail today.The majority are now able to access their e-mail accounts again and we're hoping to have service restored for the remainder very soon.

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