Relevant quote: "It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa."
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Is this affecting Chrome as well? Looks like it might be a bigger problem. It just crashed for three guys in our office within a few seconds of each other.
Chrome also starting crashing 30-or-so minutes ago, on a OS X 10.8.1, Chrome version 23.0.1271.95. I just had my Facebook account open in that window, but it continued crashing by itself after 5 minutes. GMail doesn't work , too, from neither FF nor Chrome, it does though from my iPhone (different web provider, I wonder if that counts).
I thought Chromium still had all the google tie-in issue. If I remember correctly what they pulled out was license encumbered features like font rendering. I know there were forks like iron that pull out the privacy features.
It was general for gtalk.
I was chatting with my girlfriend in Paris and I'm in Montreal right know.
Both gtalk stopped working and we finish the discussion on Skype.
Interestingly the bug links to 163267, which is marked private (i.e. a security issue). I've had more downtime out of Google in the past few years than I ever did out of my Yahoo mailbox.
As soon as Yahoo shows me my inbox instead of an ad when I sign in, I'd consider going back. Until then, all the wasted time clicking away from the ad cancels any extra uptime. Luckily I've heard Marissa is actually pushing for this change :)
I tried outlook.com for a while after the launch, but I just can't go back to the folder system. Tag & archive is now a requirement for any future email service I'll use.
+1, Chrome on Windows 7 64-bit. Started to crash every minute just around the time GMail was down. It stopped crashing after I rebooted my machine - I don't know if it is related or just a coincidence; just giving a data point.
+1. Chrome crashed once for me, and it had an interesting error message. Something along the lines of "Wahhhh!!! Chrome crashed! Would you like to restart?"
Wonder what the difference is? I don't sync among devices, but for the people that it did crash for do you sync among devices? Maybe that has something to do with it?
Wha ... how ... why would browser performance be coupled to performance of one particular site? Firefox, Opera, even IE don't crash when they're offline and unable to connect to any site.
Chrome is also crashing for me. It gives this error - Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library/ Runtime Error! / Program: C:\User... "This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way" / "Please contact the application's support team for more information."
It may be region specific, it's still down for me.
I've noticed that Hacker News seems slower since gmail went down. I'd be interested to know how traffic responded. I'm guessing a lot of people default to HN if they hit a roadblock in their work. I know I do.
Just to add some data: Did not crash for me. I am using sync and I have two gmail tabs open. However gmail has continued to work for me, only the chat has had some issues.
My Chrome is continually crashing here on a MacBook Pro Retina as well. Even just visiting unrelated sites like Android Market and others. I assume it is trying to sync my pages to my account, or pull down URL malware black lists or something, hitting the same error GMail is hitting, and crashing.
I was able to reproduce the crash once by adding a bookmark, which probably forces a sync. Gmail came back up for me, though, so I'm not able to test this again.
No crash here, using Chromium ver 22.0.1190.0, compiled from source. However, GMail is extremely slow. Have been able to refresh (and access) it 3 times in the past 5 minutes.
Meh, I've had my Gmail for a little over 6 years now. This is the first time I ever remember having this problem. (My Gmail is back up now, by the way.) I'll take this frequency over the effort it takes to maintain my own mail server any day.
Servers and services are not the same thing. I always had more than one machine, each in different geographical areas. Shell scripts kept mail stores in sync, and stupid DNS tricks were used to direct users to servers that were alive. The overall costs were low too. I'd convince the ISP I was working for to let me colocate a pair of old desktops, and trade one with a friend I'd never met face to face.
To clarify my other statement, the biggest "issue" i've had is during a failure of the primary MX messages marked as read would sometimes revert back to being unread for a few minutes.
I run my own mail server, but it's far from justifiable on a pure uptime basis. I don't have HA configured, so my mail (which serves <10 users on a box in colo) goes down for 2-3 minutes ~4-10 times per year when I reboot. Even worse, I don't really announce downtimes, but just randomly reboot it late at night if I've upgraded something important.
That's best-case. I have backup-mx, but no real failover for imap or normal smtp (other than reading mailspool directly on the backup mx). I used to do a crazy flood-fill thing with 3 servers smtp forwarding mail and marking it, but doing mail HA correctly is kind of hard (and then keeping mailstore synced from imap in sync, too).
How well would glusterfs work across the Internet? Doing local HA with some kind of SAN seems fine, but the thing I'm trying to solve is "entire datacenter goes down, make the user have no more pain than making a new imap connection". It seems like something that would really need to be handled inside IMAP (using some crazy backing store for mail, like a database) to be done well, but maybe filesystem level replication with maildir would be enough.
I wish there were some "best practices in systems administration" for different services, ranging from simple (just set up imap/dovecot) through complex (gmail-scale), per service.
There's been pretty good focus on how to do http, dns, and some database services, but not as much recently on smtp, imap, etc.
So your web mail interface is always down... I'm still sending and receiving Google Apps mail through IMAP, so we're currently at parity (except I've never had to manage my email server or deal with spam).
I think more appropriate link would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821928. Gmail downtime is still negligible WRT maintaining your own mail server. But the problem is the downtime of ecosystem built around it.
"One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king
went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people
to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the
right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."
"Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once
he had asked it.
"You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of
government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."
"When will that be?" inquired the little prince.
"Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky
almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty
minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!"
I think what he's trying to say is his downtime is planned - kernel upgrades, configuration changes, that sort of thing.
This is both somewhat true and somewhat not true. He's still vulnerable to failure of the hosting equipment and attacks from crackers. But, when he's the only admin, there's nobody else to fat-finger the server out of action, and if he only logs into the shell for service he will never fat-finger outside of planned service.
Hardware breakages and Zero-Day exploits usually tend to show up at most inconvenient times. I'd recommend everybody to not own an email server from a pure business perspective, unless you're a mail server admin anyways. There's so much time you can sink in it and still not achieve the level of security and uptime a quality email host will reach for much less money.
Now, there are arguments to run your own mailserver - you get to configure it exactly the way you want, you might see it as a hobby, ... But from a pure financial point of view it doesn't make sense.
I know what he meant, but it's not like google is improvising with gmail. The site is already up by the way, it's been years since they have a more than 5 minute downtime. Also, you can never dream of having the same kind of redundancy as gmail will have nor the collective man hours spent in the project. I don't hate the idea of self hosting your mail, I just think it's ridiculous to say you'll have a better service than gmail when you have much better arguments like privacy, control and ownership.
Availability covers data loss and account cancellations out of the blue, which has happened to a friend of mine at least. this is one of the reasons I self host.
Also, the machine is in the same lan as me so connectivity is never a problem (unless the cat chews through the ethernet cables again).
So you have redundant internet connections, back-up power generators, a high availability cluster, etc? That seems like a lot of money just to host your own mail server.
- I've run my home server. They would crash randomly and usually when something else in the house like a water heater had broken.
- I've run pay servers in the cloud. Then they magically disappear because the expiration date on my credit card updated and the best way for GoDaddy to tell me was to wipe it and then send me an email.
- I've tried free servers. I got what I paid for.
Whatever problems GMail has (and it does have problems), it's not those. Absolutely everything else has left a taste of ashes in my mouth.
Pay for servers from someone other than GoDaddy--almost anyone else, really. Home servers are a really bad solution for anything remotely important, but shared hosting from the likes of Dreamhost, VPS from a company like Linode, or EC2 instances from Amazon are all fast, reliable, and cheap.
I don't mind paying, but what happens if there is a disruption in payment methods? I'm busy, and I'm also spread very thin on "things I can concentrate on." If my credit card expires without me noticing, I don't want all code and data on the VPS to vanish on me.
Your credit card expiring will presumably cause problems with more than one service; I recommend trying really hard to keep track of that date. (There must be a calendar you can put it in?) Most good hosts will disconnect you before wiping your drive, and will send you several emails (over the course of months) before that happens. But if whatever you're doing now works, even better!
I use gmail via IMAP on mutt and it still works fine, although the Web UI is giving 502 and other various errors. I guess it's just an issue with the front-end, not the mail server itself.
I switched from hosting my own server and using local mail providers to Gmail since they had never been able to provide sufficient reliability (uptime, spam filtering, mail delivery). I use, however, Gmail with my own domain name since I want to be able to change to another provider if necessary.
Ditto, although both of my accounts are on "Apps". Not had Chrome crash either, although I never use Syncing because I just don't trust Google to get it right..
I love google products (and I'm not worried about my email for a second), but their explanation is really bad:
"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."
It sounds like something an airline might say after bumping you to another flight!
I experienced a similar issue a couple of weeks ago when my synced chrome settings & bookmarks appeared on a co-worker's machine, a machine I've never signed in on. All his stuff was gone and replaced with an outdated version of mine...
Submitting the link of a dead site has never really made any sense to me in the first place. If the company has a separate status page, post the most specific URL from that page. If not, perhaps an external checker like http://www.isup.me with a (manually entered) query string for the date would be appropriate.
To clarify what Cyranix said, it's possible to add a useless query string on the end of a URL in order to have HN fail to match a URL that's already been submitted. So say SocialMobileLocal.com goes down and someone submits a link:
status.socialmobilelocal.com
When it goes down again a year later, you can submit:
Oh that's what happened. This is a pretty unexpected oversight from a company that tests their software so extensively to have browsers crash because an email service/sync service is down.
Seems to work in Firefox, for anyone who needs to urgently access their Gmail. Still down in Chrome for me (Error 502), though it's not crashing the browser.
Oddly enough I was on Gmail and Chrome kept crashing. Did all the usual stuff, cleared everything, restarted etc. Turns out, for me at least, the only time it crashes is when I go to Gmail.com.
I'd really love to investigate and find out why these two related products behave this way but honestly I'm way too lazy.
My Chrome did not crash, yet I am logged in with Sync. Instead of keeping Gmail in a Chrome tab, I use Fluid app to make Gmail into a "desktop" app. Seems to still be up. Others can use the same workaround by opening Google apps in Firefox and Safari.
What is with the URL on this submission pointing to the URL any user of Gmail would use to access their account? Could the curators please change the submission URL to a source that shows reliable updated information?
Nope, they actually denied it => "Anonymous immediately denied responsibility for the attack on Gmail before finding out that no one knew who perpetrated the attack, thus making it a legitimately"
Been on Chrome for about 50 minutes, was on Gmail at the beginning of that. The only thing that was crashed was the chat on Gmail. Have not had a single problem with Chrome.
Gmail and all Google services are working for me using Chrome 24.0.1312.35 beta-m. I did have a 502 error for about 5 minutes, but it didn't crash the browser.
Gmail for Business works from my imap client (postbox) but not from the web site. So I guess their web interface is down - not the backend mail engine.
FWIW I assumed gmail was down because of gchat going grey and saying it couldn't communicate. It turns out the mail is actually still working, so it's just gchat that's down.
I was just going to say this. Been using Gmail daily since 2004 or so and I can count on one hand how many problems I've had. Stellar record, though as I said I am too dependent on it personally.
I have similar configuration. Fedora 64Bit, chromium and gmail work fine. No plugins for chromium, no sync, only a gmail tab is open. I use firefox for everything else. This bug seems interesting!
Given the massive scale of Gmail and the infrastructure of Google, it's highly unlikely that the entire audience of Hacker News sitting and pressing F5 every second would hurt Google's ability to bring it back up.
I don't know, if there's one thing that seems more ignorant/oblivious than the idea that HN will somehow magically DDoS GMail, it's complaining about downvotes on HN. :P
[In Focus] Google Shuts Down Gmail To Show Its Immense Power http://onion.com/UxyLs8