Google Apps and Gmail outage outrage: Problem NOT resolved
Update: The Gmail outage is not yet resolved, despite 35,000 Google Apps and consumer Gmail users agonizing over missing mail. The cloud service provider is furiously restoring from backup tapes as we speak.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second extended Gmail failure to make Computerworld's pages: an extended Gmail outage hit Apps administrators back in October 2008, and Google followed its earlier troubles with a public update on Gmail via the Official Google Blog in February 2009. The difference now is scale of consequence rather than kind — Gmail had climbed past AOL Email into third place among U.S. webmail services per comScore by mid-2009, and its pull among students was credited as the driver of Google Apps Education Edition adoption.
So a 2011 outage that leaves roughly 35,000 consumer and paid-Apps users with missing mail lands on a product Google has been positioning as enterprise-grade. The confirmed detail that restoration is running from backup tapes suggests the recovery path is slower than the failover story buyers were sold.
First-order effects
- About 35,000 Google Apps and consumer Gmail users are without their mail right now while Google restores from backup tapes, with no resolution yet announced as of March 1, 2011.
- IT administrators who chose Google Apps over running their own mail servers face angry users and must decide whether the service-level promises they bought still hold after a second major outage since 2008.
Second-order effects
- Every hour the restore runs strengthens the case competitors and on-premises Exchange shops make when pitching against Google Apps, turning reliability from a checkbox into the deciding question for renewals and new education/business deals.
- Google's response cadence — whether it publishes updates as it did after the 2009 incident or goes quiet — will shape how much transparency customers now demand contractually before committing more mail volume to the platform.
Third-order effects
- If tape-based restoration remains the fallback for a top-three U.S. webmail provider, hosted-email buyers will increasingly demand explicit data-loss guarantees and recovery-time commitments, pushing cloud providers to treat durability engineering as a selling point rather than a backend detail.
- A pattern of multi-year-spaced Gmail outages (2008, then this) points toward cloud reliability becoming a procurement criterion on par with features and price, especially in education deployments where Gmail itself drove the original adoption.
The trend: Cloud-hosted email is moving through a credibility-testing phase where each high-profile outage converts reliability from assumed to negotiated.