Wake-up call for NZ Post: Google Apps, Gmail crawl back after 3-hour global outage
[UPDATE: NZ Post manager of business enabling manager Tracy Voice told NBR this afternoon: "The effect on New Zealand Post was minimal as we are currently trialling this tool with a handful of people before wider rollout through our postal services business. All systems are subject to occasional outage and this brief disruption hasn't affected our confidence in Google Apps."]
Google’s free and corporate email and online document services have been misbehaving for more than three hours this morning, with New Zealand users - including the recently signed postal carrier - hit since around 6am.
Your correspondent - a subscriber to the $US50/year Premiere version of Google Apps (Google's online equivalent of Office, including Google Apps Mail), had his email go offline at 7.30am, and restored just after 9am - but running in slow motion, and with service phasing in and out.
Google’s first service warning, at 6.12am, said a Gmail problem was affecting a subset of users, but howls from the US to Europe, and chatter around the Twitter hash-tag #Googlefail indicated problems were occuring around the globe, en masse.
One prominent Twitterer, Australia’s Fake Stephen Conroy, offered: “Google: killing the SaaS market, one outage at a time”.
Google’s latest Apps status update, at 6.30am NZ time, says: Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.
NZ Post recently became Australasia’s largest user of the $US50 per user per year Google Apps Premiere. And while inhouse email and document sharing systems seldom enjoy, 100% uptime, the this morning’s outage is still a rude welcome for NZ Post’s 2100 staff.
After a three-hour blackout on February 25, Google offered Premiere subscribers a 15-day credit on their annual accounts.
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Comments and questions18
IF NZ Post are wanting to remove the reliance on Microsoft Outlook that does not automatically equate to a "they must be using the web interface" - there are many other email clients they could be using incl Thunderbird, iPhone, Evolution, Eudora, Blackberry - well, you get my point.
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Let's not forget that gmail wasn't completely down, just their web application.
I access gmail using their pop3 servers, so experienced no down time, I suspect this is the case for many businesses too who would prefer to use a dedicated email client rather than a browser.
I'd be interested to hear how this affected NZ Post. My understanding is that one of the reasons they were switching to Google Apps was to eliminate their reliance on Outlook, so I'm assuming they use the web site as their main form of access. If that's the case, then they would have had no IMAP or POP3 access to their mail.
[See NZ Post comment added to story above - CK]
This is a bit of ridiculous article, have you ever worked in a real business before? all that I have been involved in and they range from the 10 seat to the 10000 seat all have outages its a fact of life in IT (the cost to provide 100% uptime across a system like email is ridiculously high and even then hard to prove) and outages very often result in data loss and a lot longer period than a couple of hours. Thats not even including the endless support calls on Outlook clients, corrupt PST files, deleted emails needing to be recovered , spam etc. There is a story here if it happens more regularly but your story seems to indicate only the second in a year. What the story is actually saying is that Google or SAAS in general offer better than than the normal IT shop for about 1/4 the price - sounds good to me, im surprised everyone is not flocking to google. Im sure NZ post is feeling quite fine by it, and as a gmail user (personal only - i wish work would go that way) i use google gears which allows full offline access to my email anyway via the web interface .
[The article noted that inhouse systems don't have 100% uptime either. Google raised the bar for its SaaS service in November last year by promising 99.9% uptime: http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/chris-keall/google-seeks-reassure-business-with-time-guarantee - CK]
Got to agree with Mike here. All businesses experience outage time with their IT systems. The main difference here is that is affected more people. BTW: a 99.9% uptime still allows for almost 90 hours a year of down time. Its the people who promise 99.999% who have something to worry about.
As we still pay for International bandwidth in NZ companies must be mindful of the hidden cost when email services are off-shored. I wonder what the cost of email bandwidth for 2100 users will be per month and has this hidden cost been included in the equation?
This project must weigh the hosting and bandwidth cost against backup solutions, disaster recovery, anti-spam filtering, and server maintenance and replacement. When you add all of the factors together, including power to the servers and air conditioners I think the costs will stack up for this project.
This doesn't allow 90 hours of downtime, it's 9 hours. So 3 hour outage is 4 months worth.
[The judges concur: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.1%25+of+365+days - CK]
What a joke you are, not only do you have to lie to WS, you also have to lie to us in order to make your story more believable. ,
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As we still pay for International bandwidth in NZ companies must be mindful of the hidden cost when email services are off-shored. I wonder what the cost of email bandwidth for 2100 users will be per month and has this hidden cost been included in the equation?
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