
Gmail back soon for everyone - mjfern
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html
======
tdfx
"If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to
you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was
likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a
notification that their messages weren’t delivered. "

That's pretty scary to me. I would've hated to have gotten any e-mail alerts
or payment due date reminders during that time.

~~~
tomjen3
Since they got a warning that the email address was temporarily unavailable
(at least that's what they should have received) any well configured
mailserver should have resend the email.

~~~
kgo
Yeah, scary would be no bounce, no delivery. Bouncing is relatively graceful.

~~~
stretchwithme
even more graceful would be keeping track of bounces for 24 hours so you could
at least tell someone what they missed if there's a cliche like this.

~~~
stretchwithme
glitch!

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ck2
How on earth do they backup all that to tape?

Must be a massive amount of tape.

~~~
amock
If you look at [http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/storage/ta...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/storage/tape-storage/index.html) it talks about the reduced cost of
ownership for a 20PB tape library, so there are tape products available for
large volumes of data. The SL8500 supports 500PB of raw storage.

~~~
jedsmith
If everybody filled their mailbox, 500 PB would back up 66.1 million Gmail
accounts. Since they don't, we're probably looking at everybody on Earth: 73.8
MB per mailbox, which sounds like a pretty good shot at an average.

Looking at the SL8500, I think I'd intentionally lose data just so I could
play with it to restore it.

~~~
wlievens
Would 74 MB really cut it? I'm probably "above average" but mine uses 3 gb.

~~~
Peaker
Consider de-duplication.

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there
i love how they keep mentioning "0.02%" so you think it's some insignificant
number, but it's actually something like 150,000 accounts.

~~~
kgo
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.

I'd argue that is an insignificant number.

~~~
there
you'd probably have a different attitude if it were your account.

~~~
kgo
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.

~~~
jkahn
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.

~~~
werrett
I've spilt out my admin and day-to-day accounts. I couldn't articulate why I
thought it was a good idea but you've given me at least one!

~~~
loki99
So what if your admin account would be affected and your personal is not?
Slightly less trouble, but still!

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akent
"We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug,
which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email.
When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the
new software and reverted to the old version."

Some bug!!

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btilly
It is worth noting that this is the first significant data loss issue that I
am aware of involving gmail. As much as the incident sucks for those involved,
that is a pretty good record overall.

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bane
This is great, last night I went to bed thinking "How could Google just walk
away from this problem without fixing it, don't they have backups, what about
corporate users?"

And this morning "we have backups, we're restoring, oh and we're trying to fix
what caused it in the first place"

------
l0c0b0x
Would it be safe to assume then, that Google tests it's software upgrades with
0.02% of it's gmail account? (However many thousands clients are affected,
it's probably better than affecting ALL their clients).

I wonder how they choose their 'test' client base.

------
Cariapa
I can't remember having this sort of problem with yahoo mail. Then again they
don't build their own filesystem.

~~~
jasonkester
Yahoo is far worse. When they lose your mail, it's gone.

Yahoo Mail lost _two_ of my accounts over the years. The first time was early
in the service, and they seem to have lost _all_ their accounts at once.
Suddenly you couldn't log in, and there was an apology message saying that
you'd need to create a new account. And that you couldn't get the same email
address back, which is why my @yahoo.com address had a 2 at the end of it for
several years...

Until they locked me out of it one day. As in, I checked my mail at night,
then in the morning my password didn't work anymore. Since they have no human
beings working for them, an entire month's worth of attempts to get access
back resulted in nothing but a big pile of form letters and links to the
Forgot Password page.

So no, you're mistaken. Yahoo does have this problem. If you have an account
with them I'd strongly advise you to back everything up. Then switch to Gmail.

~~~
iwwr
Yahoo also charges a monthly fee for access to pop3. Their web interface is
slower and buggier than gmail's. There is free unlimited storage, but a
smaller limit on file sizes. The virus scan on outgoing messages is usually
slow; if gmail is doing virus scans, it's on the backend, it does not delay
the user.

