Did you know? Gmail went Down and is Up again

Yes, Gmail went down for quite sometime yesterday. At most times it became totally inaccessible and at many times - one wasn't able to open the mails. GTalk integrated into Gmail didn't work for quite a lot of time yesterday. It was all very new in the world of Google for such a unprecedented outage and there were many of my friends who pinged / called to just clarify if it was really true that GMail has gone down - well the irony was YES!!

This incident has been confirmed by a post on the GMail Official Blog today and they have attributed the outage to some European Data Centers going down for regular maintenance and some new code in Gmail that kept sending requests to the Data Centers in the same region rather than load sharing. Google confirms that the issue has been identified and also fixed.

It may be recalled that only last month, a human error had forced Google to believe every site on the Internet was malware!!. Google search created flutters and a whole lot of online confusion when a glitch in its security programme temporarily warned users that websites from all search results were potentially harmful. All websites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: "Warning! This site may harm your computer.", finally Google fixed it and attributed the error to a third party.

But yesterday's incident did bring gitters into many people thinking of the vast amount of persoanal e-mails and data stacked off in the Gmail accounts. As for me, I already am using 4947 MB (close to 5 GB) or 67% of the Gmail storage limit.