Gmail goes down; is it really cause for concern?

You must have heard the news of Google's Gmail service suffering another outage by now. The temporary breakdown affected Gmail's web interface and lasted about 100 minutes in all; you can get the low down from Judi Hasson over at FierceCIO.

According to ComScore Inc, Gmail's 37 million unique visitors rank it as the third-placed email service in the world. With so many users, the sheer torrent of complaints flooding through the blogosphere and Twitter is understandable.

While no amount of downtime is ever low enough, my opinion of the matter is that the outrage and unhappiness was disproportionate--especially for those using Gmail for free. After all, it wasn't as if the entire Gmail service crashed, a fact that many appeared not to grasp. As noted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability, ultimately "Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users."

While the Gmail team could certainly do better, I hope the entire saga can be seen from a slightly different perspective. I have more to add in today's commentary, so be sure to check it out.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at ABC News
- check out this article at Los Angeles Times

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