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Yesterday, the web version of Gmail and Google Apps went down for pretty much everyone. The downtime was about an hour plus for most people and the world stopped. Why did it happen? Basically, some routers got overloaded and shut down, which caused a rippled effect. For the full details, see Google's blog post with them being extremely clear about the technical issues (I love it when people do that).
I was honestly in disbelief to learn about many people do not have IMAP or POP access to their Gmail accounts. You can use the web interface 99% of the time, but as a backup, get an email client (be it desktop or mobile) and set up IMAP (preferably) to work with your Gmail account. Why? Well, in yesterday's case, IMAP and POP were working fine, but the web site was down. So those who had access to their Gmail account via IMAP and POP, were in luck.
Anyway, Twitter was going wild with "is gmail down" tweets. But the forums were going wild as well.
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help, Gmail Help, DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and so many more I didn't list here.
Comments:
chad
09/02/2009 02:02 pm
I use www.google.com/ig as a homepage. On that page I have my gmail as one of the boxes. I found that even though I could not get into Gmail the normal way, I could access it via the box on my homepage.
hmm
09/02/2009 03:17 pm
I don't know what you're talking about "an hour". Mine's still flaky or completely down since yesterday.
About Web
06/15/2011 08:47 am
Good that no downtime happened since then.