After Google Error Comes Gmail Outage – Are Web Goliaths Immune?

Several million people around the world were left without access to email for more than two hours on Tuesday after Gmail, Google’s web-based email service, crashed.
More than 100 million people are estimated to have been affected by the gmail outage when connections to Gmail repeatedly timed out, returning a “502 Server Error” message.

The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT.

The widespread outage affected businesses and consumers and follows a few more minor blackouts in recent months.

Gmail officers in a blog post called it an “unusual occurrence” and said Google engineers are “still investigating the root cause of the problem.”

The main reason for outage is being touted as DoS(denial of service) attack by a group of hackers owning a series of compromised pc’s. DoS attack must have targeted Gmail by sending millions of service request which must have halted down the servers.

Major companies and institutions around the world have implemented the Google Apps suite as a commercial enterprise alternative to desktop email programs and the blackout will do little to assuage companies concerns about the reliability of Web-based software.

Google, of course, is trying to lure business users over to Gmail and its other software applications, as it tries to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in the business software industry.

This incidents like today could cause Google application businesses to sit on the sidelines for longer because many big publications and companies have reported complete breakdown in their communication systems due to their over- dependency on Gmail app services.

This also goes onto show that even web goliaths are not immune to outage problems faced by smaller web startups and an extreme over dependency of one corporation on an app could also incur heavy cost in time of outages.