Gmail Is Down and Twitter is Slow (Cloud Computing)
So yesterday we got a taste of life without email for a while. Yes, the beloved epicenter of communication around these parts is GMail. Today GMail went down HARD for over 2 hours in our offices. This outage was not limited to the free Gmail users, it actually affected the Google Apps users both paid and free as well.
This is the 2nd time this year that Gmail has gone down (last time on May 14th) and both times I immediately went to Twitter to see if it was just me or was it industry wide. Well about 10 minutes into the outage there were thousands of tweets showing up about it. It started to trend on Twitter in just minutes! Within the hour I started to see the Twitter fail whale pop up periodically as well.
It seems that when Gmail went down, people in turn went in droves to Twitter to either find out more information or use that service as a replacement communication vehicle during the outage. So much traffic that it actually was slowing Twitter down and turning off some of the API functionalities. This is incredible!
Jennifer Van Grove did a report on Mashable about how the world turned to Google itself for answers to the outage. 18 of the top 20 US searches on Google were queries related to the Gmail outage.
The widespread outage caused a frenzy which led to me creating this video about "the weakest link" in cloud computing…
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Janine
