Gmail was down for so long last night that Google felt compelled to apologize this morning. Google’s online apps are unavailable for short periods of time often enough for it to be unsurprising, but the length of this outage (2 hours plus) was quite remarkable.
What do you do when you’re left waiting for a meeting or a lunch? If you’re like us, you probably check your email. What do you do if your email keeps you waiting? Something else! What better excuse could hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, have to do something else with a few precious hours than to say “all of Gmail is down?” We presume that books were read, “to read” lists were plowed through and who knows – maybe a few babies were conceived!
This April 1st, Gmail will turn 5 years old (“it’s still in Beta!”), marking 5 years that countless other startups have wistfully thought that they too could make people go nuts over a product by limiting access and requiring invitations from friends.
The fact is though that GMail is just so good as a product that even with hours of downtime, even with our concerns that Google is Big Brother waiting to happen, even with the company’s silence about regular hours-long delivery delays – we just can’t quit Gmail.
Now that Gmail is back, though, maybe it’s a good time to go install this Greasemonkey script to replace the Gmail logo in your email inbox. It’s a little complicated but the next time the service goes down at least you’ll have been trained to remember what’s really important in life. Not Gmail.
