150,000 accounts out of SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING MILLION had trouble accessing email for LESS THAN A SINGLE DAY on A WEEKEND. No accounts or emails were deleted.
Why? Because I'd need to wait 20 hours to get that critical life-changing email? If it was critical, someone could call my home phone, my cell phone, text me, actually have the local police stop by my apartment, etc.
This winter was pretty bad here in the US. More people (and much higher percentage of some company's user bases) lost power for longer periods of time in freezing temeratures.
More people die in a single day than the people who temporarily lost email access.
Sure, It'd suck in that period where I thought I lost all my emails, but all's well that ends well. Lets keep things in perspective. This was more of a "SHIT THE CABLE'S OUT" issue than a serious life changing problem for anyone affected.
It turns out that I was hit by this issue. And guess what - it was a big deal. For starters, it is a MONDAY here in Australia. There was no support information on this, and no help from Google.
Secondly, the login message was "Your account has been disabled". If I could log in, and there was a message that my email was being restored from backup because they had a failure - fine. That wasn't the case. They had disabled my Google Apps Administrator account (same account as my email), email was bouncing, and I couldn't log in to my email OR the administration interface. The "reset your password" and "unlock your account" links failed to unlock it.
Comparing an email outage to people's deaths is poor form. Of course they aren't the same. That doesn't make it an issue when email is a super important communication tool.
People who were affected had their entire Google accounts disabled, and upon trying to log in, they got exactly the same messages they would have gotten if Google had decided to delete the account for ToS abuse. Additionally, since the entire account (not just GMail) had to be disabled in order to repair things, stuff like shared google calendars went offline, so users whose accounts were not directly affected were getting misleading error messages, too.
And the bounces didn't stop until the end of the working day on Monday on the east coast.
You're both right. It IS an insignificant number, but it would suck, out loud, if you happened to be in that number. (I was not.)
I have 2 opposing feelings on the matter; 1 is that email is not backup. If you're using it as such, well, you run this risk. Email is a communication medium; if ideas or information presented therein are important to you, save them in appropriate places. Email is only a way to get the idea/info TO you, not where to keep it. And yes, I realize reasonable people disagree here.
The other is that at least with Google, the account is intimately tied to any Android devices you have. I've heard reports of people not being able to use large swaths of functionality on their phones or tablets due to them being in that insignificant number. That would make the suck possibly an order of magnitude or more worse.
Bringing the total number of affected users down to 38,660.
Not nothing, but not a lot either. My company has an exchange server for 200 or so people, and at any one point there are probably one or two people who are waiting for a password reset, errors with Calendar, public folder permissions errors, or other human error on the part of the helpdesk interns. That's a 100x increase from Google's error rate in this scenario, but it's perfectly acceptable within the context of our organisation.
That's why we have tape backups (which can take some time / effort to restore from). I think the difference is that if a user at my company has a problem they can call a human being and be told that someone is working on it, but with Google you can't do that.
This is not true. During the affected time period, those accounts could not receive email, and sent out permanent failure bounce messages. If you were one of the affected and you were sent an important email during that time... You didn't get it, and you might never get it.
I really hope that I'm not using anything you created on the web. I would hate to be a customer of a service whose owner think 150,000 users are insignificant.
The original commenter pointed out that 0.02% is a more significant figure than the Gmail team makes it out to be, and that 150,000 is very significant. I'm saying the 150,000 figure isn't as significant as it looks, either.
