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Gmail having issues

google.com

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Re: Gmail having issues

#111
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a note regarding time zones at the bottom of the page: "All times are shown in your local timezone unless otherwise noted."

Which timezone is my local timezone? A bunch of geolocation systems think I'm in Paris. I'm in Melbourne. (My ISP bought an IP block that used to be registered to a French company). That's a considerable difference.

I'm in spain and my geolocation is also always wrong.

Re: Gmail having issues

#112

If this had happened on self hosted email server, people would be claiming "this is why you don't self-host email". My company self hosts email and we have never had an outage of this sort. ever. All support emails to gmail accounts are now bouncing for us. It's also been more than 2 hours since this problem started.

The analogous claim here would be: “This is why you don’t entrust critical services to third parties.”

The name for this is "victim blaming." Someone suffers from a catastrophe (or from abuse, but that's not what happened here), and you imagine a way that it could've been avoided, never mind that things could've gone just as badly wrong the other way around.

Re: Gmail having issues

#114
post #43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another good reason to have email @yourowndomain.tld When this happens, you can spin up a temporary server and have a mechanism in place to redirect email so you don't go down when your provider does.

I've had way more downtime trying to run my own domain's mailserver for a year than I have with gmail for more than a decade.

That's not what I said. With some emphasis added:

> When this happens, you can spin up a temporary server and have a mechanism in place to redirect email so you don't go down when your provider does.

Use a commercial provider, but fall back to your own server when it goes down without changing your email address.

Re: Gmail having issues

#115
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In lieu of an actual Googler, how about some educated speculation? It blows my mind that Google can even have problems like this. Aren't their apps highly distributed across tons of CDNs? Don't they have world class Devops people that roll out changes in a piecemeal fashion to check for bugs? How exactly can they have an issue that can affect a huge swath of their customers across countries? Insight appreciated.

Software isn't as simple as splitting across different locations to prevent global failures.

I thought SMTP was specifically designed for this (with support for multiple MX entries, queuing at the sender MTA side, etc.) and there's an easy hard boundary at the user mailbox level you can use to partition your system.

It should not be a problem that gmail is "down". Unless this would be happening for more than a few days, noone would lose e-mail. It's a problem that it's not returning a temporary error code, but permanent one.

Re: Gmail having issues

#117
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this page is readable Not easily so on mobile - the need to zoom multiple times and scroll in 2 directions to read simple information is a PITA.

Because it's not for mobile. Engineers who look at this tend to work from a computer.

Says who? Information about emergency issues are often spread on mobile phones.

Re: Gmail having issues

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I like rich, data-heavy, information dense desktop displays. Mobile UIs are such garbage, not to mention shit like reddit that only is able to process a request 30% of the time.

Agreed. it drives me absolutely berserk that Reddit forces you to "Click to view more comments" just to see like 3 more comments.

That particular anti user behavior is a strategy to pay reddit gold, which removes that limitation.

Re: Gmail having issues

#119

What is a status page that has the time without timezone

There is a note regarding time zones at the bottom of the page: "All times are shown in your local timezone unless otherwise noted."

It should still say the assumed TZ as others note. Many people use VPNs and geo-ip lookup is not infallible anyway.

Edit: Apparently it's browser settings, which means you need scripting enabled for this page.

Re: Gmail having issues

#120
post #88

As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.

The question is what exactly is the new “feature” that got pushed skipping canary is.

NSA backdoor?
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