In the latest in my ongoing series of Major websites experiencing outages, GMail has been down for at least the last hour. Google’s Mail service is excellent and over all I’ve always been pleased with it. Their servers are redundant, I don’t have problems with lost email messages, and the spam filtering is second to none. I also am a big fan of the search, filtering, and conversation features that make it the best email experience I’ve ever had, but today, it’s down, and I can’t access my email, which again slows down my productivity. But I take it as a bit of comfort, because the next time one of my sites goes down I’ll remember, even Google has server outages sometimes.
It’s important to note that while the web interface (which I primarily use) is down, the IMAP appears to be fully operational, so I’m still getting new emails buzzing on my iPhone constantly, I just much prefer to work on the web based interface with all of the search functionality that makes it easy to find just the right message when I need it. I hope the server comes back up again soon.
Also before some jerk calls me a fool and tells me that I’m screwing up with my urls, it’s not just me, None of my coworkers are able to get on GMail, neither can my wife (who is not here), nor several friends online. A Simple Date Based Google Blog Search shows that many other people are experiencing problems with 502 errors on the GMail interface today
Update: After getting everything operational again, Google Blogged about the outage, apologizing for the inconvenience.