Four Reasons I Don’t Care That Gmail Went Down - February 24, 2009 at 4:43 am

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Gmail experienced an outage in Europe overnight.  There’s some handwringing and frustration about it.  But you know what? I don’t care.  Here’s why.

1. The last significant Gmail outage looks to have been in August.  Four months ago.  My old email provider, which cost about $25,000 more per year than our enterprise Google account (which includes a whole lot more), used to “have some issues” (as we put it) about once every four weeks. 

2. Google’s Gmail ops team is working on this.   Correct that – they worked on it and it’s already fixed.  I didn’t have to do anything.  I didn’t have to submit a ticket.  I didn’t have to call.  I didn’t have wonder if anyone else was having the problem.  It’s fixed.

3. No matter what the problem was, I’m not going to have to go out and buy a new server or install a patch.  I’m not going to have to do anything other than wait a few minutes and try again.  Awesome.

4. No matter what the problem was, I’ll bet you $100 I didn’t lose any data and that you didn’t either.  The sum total cost of the problem was inconvenience.  Although that can feel significant, it’s so much better than incurring substantial actual real dollar costs.

So that’s it.  Gmail is back up and all that’s left to do is complain.  But I’m going to ignore the complainers on this one.  This is definitely no big deal.

 

 

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Tags: cloud, gmail, google