Google's Gmail service went down for a "small subset" of users for a couple of hours this morning, Pacific Daylight Time, according to CNET News. The outage began sometime around 0730 PDT and was cleared up by around 1000 PST.
This is the fourth Gmail outage of the year. Earlier this week Google had trouble with its Google News service going offline for a couple of hours as well.
Google apologized "for the inconvenience" and thanked everyone "for your patience and continued support."
That patience and support is starting to wane for some.
David Coursey at ComputerWorld, for example, called today's failure "just too much to bear."
I'm not sure I go that far, but Google's reliability or lack thereof is starting to create a credibility gap regarding whether it's products are sufficiently reliable for corporations to use on an exclusive basis.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
