Gmail Down

[jgrahamc]

Likely to be one of the least interesting comment threads ever on HN.

It would be nice if people who posted these 'x is down' threads turned them into polls so that the extent (or not) of a problem could be seen. Even better if the poll had some large geographical options.

[jdminhbg]

A poll would not be possible: http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

[frsandstone]

I made one as polling on HN is down.

http://www.polljunkie.com/XAq3zW/Poll16008.aspx

[wbhart]

It's only a partial outage (Google says 2% of users - much lower than I suspected).

Mine's been down for about half an hour (I'm in the UK). Someone did an Ask HN where it was mentioned that #gmail was trending on twitter which suggests that the problem is widespread. Edit: it is trending on twitter in the US at least. I didn't bother checking other locations.

I suppose one doesn't need to make the obvious observation that Google are of aware of the problem:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

Edit2: It's back up for me. Now we wait to see what caused it, which is where the interesting technical information will emerge.

[swah]

Me too, brazilian here...

[swasheck]

was down. back up as of about 5 minutes ago. US-CO

[vikram360]

Down in India too

[conanite]

I, for one, was hoping "show detailed technical info" would show me some detailed technical info, you know, to keep me going while gmail gets some defibrillation.

But all it says is "Numeric Code: 93". What's that? lmgtfy doesn't help - partly because google groups/forums are also down, and that appears to be where the answers are.

[wbhart]

I had the pleasure of looking through forum post after forum post on Numeric Code 93 shortly after the problem started. This actually didn't appear to help. There was no information, only people reporting the same issue over and over.

[reustle]

We joked about this "detailed technical info" in the office as our email was down. Why aren't unhelpful error codes dead?

[barik]

The status page indicates that it's a service disruption: http://www.google.com/appsstatus

Some Universities have also posted the issue to their pages: https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/

There's certainly an opportunity of a side discussion on the use of cloud computing for services.

[manojlds]

Is this a sign of an exceptional service that a minor outage ( I haven't seen it in my personal account or two apps accounts ) causes so much talk about it?

[ajross]

It's a sign that despite all the focus on new gadgets and forms of interaction, the really important stuff are the service that were figured out decades ago. People aren't talking about it because of what a great service gmail is, people are talking about it because ZOMG EMAIL IS DOWN!!!

You can go days without tweets. You can turn off your IRC window or Google+ hangout. You can lose your phone and recover, most of us have. But for a tech person losing email is being cut off from the world.

[celticjames]

It's weird. When I was a kid, it took hours to make a trans-atlantic call to my grandmother. Now I feel like a man lost in the desert if I'm momentarily disconnected from globally available near-lightspeed communication.

For those looking for a distraction while email is temporarily gone, why not contemplate the lighter side of the singularity: http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot...

[trickjarrett]

Still loading and working fine for me.

[ceejayoz]

Same here.

[orbitingpluto]

That is an awful interface for the color blind.

The Google UI Law:

The quality of a Google UI is proportional to the number of users expected to see it.

(This is bad, but of course AdWords is the most glaring example.)

[azylman]

Mine's fine...

[Luyt]

"We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

[vikram360]

When I click on "show detailed technical info" it says Code 93

[ambler0]

Gmail is telling me that I have an incorrect log/pass, not that it is down. Successfully checked my email a few hours ago...

[Yarnage]

Title of post: Gmail Down

Opened up the article: :Less than 2% of gmail users can't access gmail.

Hype much? Though email is one of those things that you never want to go down. I couldn't give two shits if any website goes down for a little bit of time on the rare occasion but email? That could make me miss the spam / opportunity of a lifetime.

[thematt]

There's over 260 million Gmail users. I understand the outage percent is low but at 2%, that's still 5.2 million people. That's bound to spark some talk on the interwebs.

[swasheck]

Perhaps they're distracted. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120416085550303

[patrickod]

Hmm only 1 of my 2 apps domains seems to be suffering an outage.

[vincentmac]

My personal gmail service is down too; however, my Google Apps gmail is fine. Not too concerned though. Gmail has been very solid for me throughout the years.

[cmaggard]

My personal is down, but my work email is fine. However, some coworkers' work email is down, but their personal is fine.

Sporadic is definitely the name of the game here.

[webwanderings]

Another opportunity for Google to realize that their Email service is lot more important and substantive than their Plus service.

[joshmlewis]

The things I think would do well on HN never get upvoted, the things I come across and don't submit are always the ones that do.

[logicalmoron]

API appears to be working, my Mail.app and Sparrow app are receiving mail fine.

Enterprise Google mail also appears to be working.

[gautamsomani]

Mine is working fine. Sent a mail, even received one. Last few mails are opening too.