The End of the World as We Know it.

It seems that yesterday, while I was not at home (and away from my PC) Gmail went down.

I don't know for how long or how many people were actually affected, but an article in the NY Times Technology section [A Modern-Day Blackout: Gmail Goes Dark] says,
".....Gmail, the company’s popular Web e-mail service, has been down for a very large number of users for about an hour or so".

"very large number of users"? How many is that? A thousand? Several hundred thousand? Millions? A Brazillion?
This is a big deal?
NY Times?
I especially love the comments left by readers. I pasted some of my favorites here:

Been working for me all day. I love gmail!
— Posted by kb

What a bunch of morons. This is what they get for censoring what users can see on their site. First they censor Anti-Obama sites then Drudgreport.com gadgets on iGoogle. If Google died today I would not care. They suck!!
— Posted by xinunus

A website goes down for an hour and you feel you have to make a blog post about it? This is how far the Times has fallen?
— Posted by Thomas

Isn’t gmail free? What are you people complaining about? You get what you PAY for. Stuff happens, tech stuff goes bad, get over it and move on.
— Posted by Brian

What irritates me most about gmail is that the image thumbnails often (VERY often) DO NOT WORK. I am one of those poor unfortunates who still has dial-up and having reliable thumbnails is the main reason I use gmail at all.
— Posted by Richard

[ Note: poor Richard still has dial up. Rather than snicker, let us have a moment of silence.]

I don’t like gmail because it doesn’t say “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!!!” when I log in.
— Posted by Special Ed

Gee, it’s free. Who you gonna sue? Are you the last person to have just 1 email account?
— Posted by Bob Brancato


Gmail goes down for one hour and it’s a big deal? No. People in this modern age are so whiny and demanding that they expect everything to always work and never have any problems.
If you cannot survive for one hour without something, anything, then the problem is with you. People demand the latest of everything to be released even before anything has time to be tested out, then they complain it does not work.
My conclusion… this is the saddest generation yet, of entire families who would have nervous breakdowns if even their HD went out for ten minutes.
Pathetic…
— Posted by SK

90 Minutes… seriously folks. It probably took longer to conceive of and write this post. Whatever the scope of the outage - it was fixed in 90 minutes. How many corporate environments can claim that kind of turn around for an outage, much less a global service like Gmail?
I’m a pretty busy guy, but I can live without my web mail for 90 minutes.
— Posted by Tim

Waaaah! Waaaah! My email was down for an hour! The sky is falling! Waaaah!
— Posted by Visigothan

Updates:
update on an earlier post.
we feel your pain and we're sorry.