GMAIL PLAQUED BY OUTAGES

By M.S.Welles

Gmail has become increasingly popular and its widespread use has been adopted within the corporate structure.

There have been a number of outages that are adversely affecting the use of Gmail. It's to be expected that as Google Apps like Gmail become prevalent and garner more notoriety, any and all outages will attract more negative attention.

As a result many corporate managers are now re-evaluating whether or not to allow G-mail to be used for corporate business.

Because e-mail is mission critical for business users, if users feel that G-mail isn't reliable, they won't adopt it for use within the corporate structure. A worldwide outage in late August caused inconvenience, frustration and drew a lot of negative publicity to the application.

According to Google's official Gmail blog, the outage was caused by a server traffic jam. Due to an underestimation of load, a few request routers became overloaded and told the rest of the system to stop sending messages. Within a few minutes nearly all of the request routers became overloaded.

Google officials commented that they've turned their full attention to making certain this type of thing doesn't reoccur.

Analysts suggested that a separation of corporate and consumer Gmail to separate infrastructure may avoid this problem in the future. The standard for most email services is 99.9% uptime, so it's essential that Google show consumer and commercial services are largely independent of each other.

According to Google's blog, within seconds of the outage Google engineers were alerted to the outage and brought additional request routers online restoring 99.9% availability to users within 100 minutes.

But this outage follows other widely felt and publicized outages in February and May which have brought a great deal of adverse publicity to both Google and the application.