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Gmail was down

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Re: Gmail was down

#341
post #243

This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc... Scary how much faith we put in this free service.

Using Gmail is no reason to ignore the necessity of a local backup. I use CloudPull (OS X, payware). And please note that Gmail is not free for everyone, there are many Google Apps users.

+1 for CloudPull — it's a fantastic product.

Re: Gmail was down

#342

Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?

Took the words out of my mouth. I suppose that the logic is "hey, I wonder if it's just us... surely someone on HN will complain the instant that things go south, better check there first." Checking twitter never occurs to me...

I was happy with that. The first thing I did was try from a couple different proxies then try a different gmail account and I was in wtf mode. Google's status indicator was showing everything was fine. I then checked HN and it was at the top. Their status indicator reflected the state of affairs 15 mins later.

Re: Gmail was down

#344
Most Google services except Gmail seem to be having issues at present. My experience was that I was corresponding with someone about a tech support query for an application they run on Google Compute Engine. Just as he asked me to hit some developer swizzlesticks in my Google Chrome, the problems started. First Google Chrome crashed on my PC, then Google chat went, then Gmail, G+ and eventually everything. A few minutes later their Apps Status Dashboard showed an outage. From now on I shall refer to that particular swizzlestick as the Kill Google swizzlestick, and shall laugh maniacally when pressing it.

Re: Gmail was down

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole online review thing is thoroughly broken. I am not even talking about people leaving bad reviews for things like "the seller didn't ship it on time", etc. I am talking about the fact that most people that leave a review have nothing to compare the product to. For example, try shopping for a wireless router. You'll find lots of people either praising or bashing it but having no basis for comparison. Star rat…

Are there offline reviews that are better? Do you trust the information of a salesperson better? I think there are definitely problems with a selection bias of who leaves reviews, but sites like Amazon have implemented a number of features to improve upon them like rating distributions (how many 5, 4, 3 ,2, and 1s), the vine program, reviewer rankings, verified purchases, large volumes etc.

Consumer Reports is actually pretty damn good for most things, especially in terms of reliability ratings. Good reviews is one of the things I'm happy to pay for, since the web doesn't seem to have spawned a good free alternative.

Re: Gmail was down

#348
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they are aware that there's a problem

Revised statement: "I wonder if Google processes the twitter feed looking for keywords to assist in monitoring their most-used services"

It happened at one point. Turns out it's kind of superfluous, and a fairly noisy data source.

Re: Gmail was down

#350
post #273

Very funny that me and my coworkers at nearly the same time opened our office doors to look into each others eyes and silently confirm that we were having the same issue. Then we all turned around and went back into our offices to check HN to see if it was just us. Very funny that everyone reading this did something similar. 84 points in 4 minutes.

It makes me feel uneasy how reliant on Google I have become and basically everyone else I know.

If you take a look at your life as see everything else you are reliant on then you might have a full blown panic attack.
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