Google has done a little more to undo its secretive ways by coming clean about a technical problem that brought down Gmail for its millions of users.
Apologising for the outage, the giant said it didn’t normally blog about its technical glitches, but was making an exception this time as “so many people were impacted.”
Todd Jackson, a Gmail product manager, used the company’s blog to explain that a temporary outage in the service’s contacts system prevented it from properly loading.
At the time, media reports that Google was suffering a ‘system-wide’ failure with Gmail raised tensions among its users, who had not been notified of the problem.
The Technologizer blog blasted that Google’s corporate blogs would be “far more valuable if and when” Google “use[s] them to communicate …about issues like this.”
Another Gmailer, who, like all users, only got Google’s official word on the outage after it had been resolved, mused that “Maybe the G stands for Gone.”
“We feel your pain, and we're sorry,” Jackson wrote. “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts,” he added, pointing out upset Google staff had also been in touch.
“We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.”
Aug 14, 2008
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