Where were you during the great Gmail outage of February 2009?
If you live in the United States, chances are, you were asleep. But for those in other parts of the world, and those of us who are nocturnal, Google's email service, Gmail, was down for several hours on Tuesday morning.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had already acknowledged a Gmail problem in August 2008 in an earlier Gmail service apology, making the February interruption a sharper test of confidence in an email service used by both consumers and Google Apps customers. The outage's worldwide reach turns availability from a product feature into an operational dependency for Google's hosted-service users.
First-order effects
- Gmail consumers and Google Apps users lose access to email for several hours, interrupting personal correspondence and workplace communications.
- Google must restore service and address an availability failure affecting a core hosted product.
Second-order effects
- For Google Apps customers, the interruption makes email continuity a business-process concern rather than solely a consumer-service inconvenience.
- Google's paid App Engine plans arrive as the company is asking developers and businesses to rely more heavily on its hosted infrastructure, increasing the importance of service reliability across its cloud offerings.
Third-order effects
- Hosted email and application platforms are shifting the burden of uptime from local operators to service providers, making outage handling and reliability central competitive criteria.
- As organizations consolidate communications and software with a small number of web platforms, a single provider interruption can affect both consumer activity and business operations at once.
The trend: The expansion of hosted communications and computing is making provider uptime a defining measure of trust for consumer and business users alike.