If you weren’t aware of Gmail going down recently, you were either lucky and weren’t using Gmail during the outage or you’re not keeping on top of the online world’s latest news. To fill you in, Gmail’s special servers which handle the incoming email traffic and then direct that load to the appropriate email server went offline after buckling under capacity. Normally, the routine maintenance Google was running on their servers by removing servers from the “cloud” wouldn’t cause this problem. But, the traffic they received was far higher than they expected and the pipes got hosed.
The , Ben Treynor, weighed in on the topic at Gmail’s blog. Kudos to Gmail since their traffic record with being cloaked in secrecy hasn’t led to many open conversations with them and this is definitely a step in the right direction.
The takeaway here, though, is how did we handle this blip? Twitter went crazy. The blogs started firing up. And before long, everyone in the email world was talking about the issue. Perhaps this particular blackout had more of an effect on the tech world due to the theory of more tech savvy folks using Gmail (although correlation doesn’t mean causation).
Regardless, I think this proves why it’s good to have multiple email addresses at different ISPs so if, for whatever reason, one goes down, you can still maneuver via email.
I also believe this puts increased pressure on email address providers to be more responsible - when you mess with this or tweak that, you potentially affect millions of inboxes if you’re one of the big players. Slow down and think about things for a while before making a potentially sweeping change. Mistakes happen, though. It’s just about minimizing their occurrences.
Finally, this exercise reinforces the fact that email is not fault tolerant, but pretty darn reliable. If mail doesn’t get through on the first try, email servers queue it up and try again. While the delivery may not be timely, it will usually happen nonetheless.
How did you handle the crisis?
Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler
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