Google's GMail was unavailable for several hours today. Problems occurred in early morning and it was not a local issue. GMail began to operate again around noon.
The last GMail's outage was in August 2008. Users did not have access to their mails for several of hours.
Did you already get your backup? I did! ;-)
You can find more details at:
If you noticed yesterday outage of the Google e-mail service, it was an error on your side. Google had a bug in the system of contacts and it caused malfunction of the web interface of Gmail. Failure of the service lasted approximately two hours and affected mainly web interface. Users, who accessed their mailbox in alternative ways, probably did not notice any problems.
This time you do not have to worry about the e-mails, the archive has not been affected by this bug. Bug was removed and Gmail is fully functioning now. Although there is no data loss, we should be careful.
Did you already get your backup? I did! ;-)
You can find more on:
There is a lot of posts around the internet which refers to the e-mail lost caused by the outage of the service provider. If you are using the GMail, you have to keep in mind that GMail is still marked as BETA (see the small notice bellow the GMail logo). Today I have found this article about the large GMail disaster. To protect against this large lost of your e-mails, you can use automatic e-mail forwarding to another service provider, but it is not very convenient. To overcome some limitations of the "forwarding" approach, we have developed a new tool, so you can make the full or partially backup of your GMail account. With the GMail backup tool you can also migrate your GMail account, because we use the standard e-mail formats. You can also change your GMail e-mail address by doing the backup of your existing account, then creating the new account and then restoring the saved content into the new mailbox.
This is quite old story (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061230-8524.html) but still important. They report that many users lost emails form their Gmail account. What about you?
They recomend to regulary backup emails stored in the Gmail account. I will cite the source:
Gmail users should consider using the service's POP functionality for backup purposes. For those of us that
depend
on consistent and reliable mail access for business, mail backups are as important as document backups if not
more
so.
As you can read here http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/12/gmail_disaster_google_confirm..., even Google advise their own users to backup their emails. So, it is probably better to do it.