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Gmail, the online email service from Google,
suffered an outage of almost two hours
earlier this month when some routine
hardware maintenance went wrong. From
private individuals to business accounts,
every user of this web interface across the
planet was affected.
In a blog, Ben Treynor, Vice President of
Engineering and Site Reliability, explained:
“we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers
offline to perform routine upgrades. This
isn't in itself a problem - we do this all
the time and Gmail's web interface runs in
many locations and just sends traffic to
other locations when one is offline.”
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Throughout the period of downtime which ensued only IMAP/POP
access remained so users collecting their messages via
Outlook or any other email client would have been
unaffected.
No
differentiation between private and business email
This outage again raises the question over the lack of
differentiation between Gmail accounts for individuals and
business users. Google has always made clear its policy of
offering the same services to all account holders via the
same infrastructure but this does mean the slightest problem
will
affect all users equally. Some analysts judge this to be a
mistake and have advocated the segmentation of private and
business traffic, a practice which is common amongst other SaaS providers.
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