Some people check their email once an hour. Others, every five minutes. But a recent Google Apps outage made a number of accounts inaccessible for around 30 hours, and a prominent blogger had his account disabled to boot.
Neither episode will help Google’s reputation on the reliability front. Another Google Apps outage occurred a little less than two months ago, and since it lasted about 15 hours, the problems almost appear to be getting worse. Also, although Google offered users of the Premier Edition a free extension of service following that breakdown, some sort of compensation has yet to be offered this time around.
Here are the details of the latest round of issues, anyway. Eric Zeman reports, “Starting at some point Wednesday afternoon, users noticed that they were unable to log into their Google accounts. Rather than accepting their sign-in credentials, users were met with a ‘502 error’ message from Google.”
As for the disabled account, it was Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker who was affected yesterday, and his problem seems to have lasted for 15 hours. He noted that business associates received the somewhat embarrassing message “Technical details of permanent failure: Account disabled” during this time.
More than a few folks are likely to establish backup accounts with Yahoo and Microsoft due to these problems, and a handful may move away from Google altogether. Still, in the grand scheme of things, not much is liable to change at this point, and Google fans can at least note that the downtime experts at Pingdom are highlighting little-known products instead of harping on difficulties.
