What recession? Declarations of apocalypse flooded the Internet during a global Gmail outage that lasted a few hours. Some of the panic seemed to be contrived or tongue-in-cheek, but some of it also seemed like genuine terror, judging from the tweets and cries of “Gfail.”
It’s easy to poke fun at the gravely Gmail-dependent, but it’s also a reminder that most of us are increasingly tied to the cloud. In California, the outage happened during the time most people were asleep. (Except the insomniacs who were tweeting about it.) But in London, it started at 9:30 a.m., which meant a loss of three or four hours of productivity. Google Apps were down, too, so the businesses that rely solely on Google’s Web-based word processor and spreadsheets were out of luck.
Cloud computing is supposed to be the future, but this reminder of its limitations is a good time to think about pushing companies to develop offline backups or synchronization. The folks over at Microsoft, who are supposed to be making a big bet on the Internet, should probably be (and maybe they are) trying to figure out a way to capitalize on this brief Gmail outage to remind us of the virtues of software that comes in a box. It wouldn’t be backward thinking, but an acknowledgment that technology isn’t perfect. The cloud can go poof at any moment.Gmail didn't fail like that.
Thanks to its IMAP servers and offline features, some users simply pressed on, oblivious. Call it a little sunshine on what could have been a very overcast day for cloud computing.
