Full Speed

[ August 27, 2004 ]

Centralized Problems

A few hours after reading Shelley’s recent post on problems with Tecnorati and the scaling of centralized network services in general, I am faced with the following error message when trying to open my email:

gmail error

While I don’t believe in turning off servers at night, many companies do this. I suppose a scheduled outage or downtime is just something that we have to deal with from time to time, but to my knowledge, this is an unannounced outage. Has Gmail scaled beyond its capacity already? I seriously doubt it.

I realize that Gmail is beta software, but it sure is disappointing that it is completely down right now. And Google’s definition of beta seems to be somewhat different from the definition most software organizations use. How long has Google News been in beta now?

I have always been extremely impressed by all of Google’s products that I have used, including Gmail. But my good old POP3 server is certainly looking more attractive at the moment.

I first began to see this error at around 2:30am here in Texas. At the time of this writing, the service has been down for over half an hour.

Update: Well over an hour has three hours have passed, and I am still unable to log in. I can get a login screen, but I get the above error every time I try to log in. Oddly, though, I can log in to a different account from my PC but not mine. Perhaps Google doesn’t like me tonight. I finally went into my Firefox cookie store and manually deleted all gmail.google.com cookies and was able to log in afterwards. I certainly hope the folks at Google fix this problem soon, as the average webmail user will not tolerate this sort of thing.

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