You've just described one of my biggest problems w/ outsourcing mail, etc.
Really, downtime isn't a big deal (to an extent, of course) because most people realize that "shit happens" and there will be the occasional downtime regardless of who's handling mail.
The problem is that you are, in effect, helpless in these situations. Like you mentioned, you can at least keep your customers updated when it's a problem with your own machines. When you've outsourced it to someone else, you're at their mercy, so to speak.
"What's wrong with the mail system?" "I dunno." "When do you think it will be fixed?" "I dunno." "Today? Tomorrow? Next week?" "I dunno."
It's true that it can be awkward in such situations, but there are two things that still make it "better":
1. Google will bring it back up in a timeframe that is very comparable (if not better) than your average in-house IT team would.
2. Given (1), if you ask people how much per year they are willing to pay for transparency in such circumstances, most businesses will not be willing to dedicate very much of their budget towards it unless it increases reliability. The "helpless" feeling is just because you can't see Google's engineers working to fix it. Surely no one doubts that they are doing their utmost to bring it back.
This was pretty much my reaction. We switched about 3 years ago from a self hosted Exchange system and up until now it has been pretty good. Only issues were isolated accounts offline for under a hour.
Back then I could say we are about 75% back and give a full description of the issue in laymans terms which usually curbed the anxieties. Today I basically pointed them to the status page saying that this is all I have to work with. In my experience Google's support has been pretty bad but that is because most of the time their products work well, but yea I feel in the dark when something like this occurs. Still their uptime has been better than having that "oh shit" moment because a DC is degraded.
In the end, everyone could still access the email and nothing was lost.
Because you asked, I tracked down a support number and called it. It said that: "we are experiencing a problem with gmail. Check google.com/appstatus for updates. If your issue is NOT about gmail, please stay on the line."
It's a mess, but on the flip side what could support do for you? They knew about it and I'm guessing every engineer on the team was working on getting service back online.
All they really can do is tell you "It's down. We're aware of the issue. We're actively working to resolve it."
PST is broken too - all my clients are PST and most are effected. About half are paid, others are grandfathered free accounts and I see no appreciable difference.
I've had issues getting steadily worse all day across domain since ~9 am est or so. I just received this from Google as part of an auto reply to support ticket.
"Thanks for your patience.
Please read below for updates on the status of your issue:
Updates since last message:
This issue has been partially resolved for some users. We expect it to be fully resolved within the next hour. The issue caused severe delays sending emails, especially emails with large attachments. It also caused delays in loading Drive files with large images.
The delays were caused because of a problem with an undersea cable. All parties involved are actively working to:
1) Redirect traffic and add additional capacity to resolve the immediate issue.
2) Fix the problem with the faulty undersea cable.
"
Wild guess: google routes non-latency-critical US traffic like SMTP outside the US so the NSA's beam splitters can more easily claim intercepted domestic data as "international".
We've been reporting delayed inbound emails to Gmail (Google Apps) since Friday 13th.
Glad to see they're now acknowledging it, though the percentage affected listed here seems remarkably low, considering an informal survey of employees and clients suggests from 1 in 50 increasing to 1 in 20 affected over the past week, with delays up to 24 hours.
Messages like this are only sent if the password was correct, AFAIK. (Google sends the message in part as a warning and in part to explain that no, your password wasn't wrong, they just don't think it was actually you.)
This was presumably not you, so change your password immediately.
I think this is a bit more complicated than normal.
You can read the RFCs if you want to, but normally what happens if an email cannot be delivered is that it will sit in the queue on the SMTP server trying to relay it with status: deferred.
What's different this time around is that gmail is actually reporting that emails ARE being delivered, even though they may not be.
Earlier this morning, I did a manual SMTP transaction[1] with aspmx.l.google.com and got an OK status when I sent the email.
This means that a server relaying mail to gmail would NOT leave a message in its own queue (to retry delivery later), because the server would "think" that it had been delivered.
The problem here is that my "delivered" message did not show up in my inbox until quite a bit later.
SO! Instead of the SMTP system being able to take care of its own outages, the responsibility is upon google to have properly queued messages for delivery internally, and then to deliver them when the system goes back to normal.
It sounds like what is happening is that google is accepting the messages, but then they aren't getting delivered to a mailbox. They're being queued somewhere along the way (at google).
--
Your emails will probably be fine, but unfortunately you probably can't call your mail administrator and ask what is up (unless you work at google). Normally, you'd be able to look in your smtp logs and see a message status (delivered, deferred, etc.)
Google services have lately seemed like something Ralph Nader warned you about.
Lately I've found that many Google services (like Google Groups) don't work entirely right with IE or Firefox and they only work right with chrome.
Today I logged into my Google Analytics for the first time, and Google wanted to verify my phone by sending me an SMS. Well, my house is outside the GSM service footprint except when there's a strong temperature inversion, so I get in my car and drive 2 miles, park at the school, don't get the message, I reboot my phone, the message finally comes, then I drive home, and by that time I guess my session timed out because after I typed in my verification code into my computer, it asked me for my password and wanted me to verify again.
I canceled and then Google Analytics in years came up (after about three minutes loading) and locked my browser (Google Chrome) up, until I discovered there was some dialog box that wound up off my main screen that was locking it up.
And then they came out with the new gmail which seems to be yet another scheme to shove Google+ down my throat.
Try doing a search for a programming related query and instead of getting the relevant documentation you get something in broken English that tells you what a loser you are because you are trying to do what you're trying to do and gives you ten incoherent reasons why you shouldn't do what you're doing.
Meanwhile, Matt Butts is making Youtube videos about how you'd better make sure that anybody who links to your site had better make it a nofollow link because if anybody makes you a link that's not a nofollow link you must surely be a spammer. Therefore, you should check all your links in Google Webmaster Tools and write a polite letter to anybody who links to your web site that they'd better remove the links or if they can't do that, make the links nofollow.
Speaking of Youtube, if you're in the 80% of the land area of the USA where all you can get is bad DSL and bad satellite service, it's just unwatchable. Amazon Prime, Vudu, Netflix and everybody else seem to be able to cope, but I don't find anything entertaining at all on Youtube when I have to wait 15 minutes to see a 3 minute video,.
Oh yeah, but if you get 50,000 people to plus you, maybe your site rankings will move from the third page to the second page, or maybe not.
The only organizations who can get away with being linked to today are Wikipedia and spam factories that used to be search engines, like about.com, because if Google bans them (as they should) the DoJ will be on them with an anti-trust lawsuit.
What's worst about it is that if some small competitor comes up with something better, Google buys them up, shuts them down, and then you're left with Google's offerings which just get worse every week.
I remember when I was proud to be a Google AdSense publisher because it didn't have the "one rule to a flat tummy" ads and you know what, they bought the sleazy ad networks and now AdSense is as sleazy as anything. Oh, but if you have one erotic painting from 1649 on your site out of 1,000,000 images they'll kick you out of AdSense without warning the day you are flying back from a conference in San Francisco after one of their agents watches you give a talk at a conference about your web site.
I will say I'm impressed with android, both as an end user and a developer -- it's amazing. But my understanding is that their "scalable" platform for distributed applications is getting long in the tooth and that everything takes four times longer for Googlers to do it than anybody else. Their recruiters never stop calling, never get the hint that you don't want to go work at their beehive where whatever they pay you won't go very far because unless you commute to Fresno you'll spend it all on a mortgage for a house that will be worthless in 25 years and, of all places, you know you'll be just a number to them, if you don't fit their mathematical model of what a coder or a product manager or whatever it is, you just suck.
That won't stop the recruiters from calling though, because the whole point isn't that they want your labor but they just want to kneecap their competitors by taking anybody who can pass an IQ test and wants to live around San Jose away.
Google used to be about a culture of excellence, but today Google is the new Microsoft. Because they never release versions, the press never catches on to the fact that Google's services are like Windows 8.
This comment has nothing to do with the article except for "I hate Google" sentiment, and does a pretty lousy job of it. It seems reasonable to assume you don't need to drive 2 miles to answer your phone, and "Matt Butts" is just juvenile.
I do need to drive 2 miles to answer my phone, really. Don't get me started on AT&T and Verizon or the Nigeria-class broadband service in the US. Cell service sort works in mid-tier cities like Rochester, NY, but go to Greenwich Village or Beverly Hills and try getting a signal.
When I talk to people in China or India or Australia or Germany, I get a good connection, but when I talk to people in Encino or Boston I have to repeat half of what I say because their connections keep dropping out.
Calling him Matt Butts gives me once chance in ten that his team of flying monkeys won't see a reference to his name and ban all my web sites and every web site that links to my web sites (except for Wikipedia)
And it's not just "I hate Google", I used to love Google. I've just watched how Google's ecosystem has wrecked the web. So many topics are dominated by old crappy web sites (talked about in Hacker News today) and these sites have an incentive NOT to improve because if you make any radical change in your web site, there's a high risk that your rankings will tank.
In the meantime, if you want make a good site, there's a high risk you'll build it and nobody will come.
If the comment above has gotten a lot of votes it's because a lot of people feel the same way. I think tomorrow I am calling my broker and selling GOOG short.
Perhaps you do need to drive 2 miles to answer your phone, but I think the point was that the vast, vast majority of Google's users do not need to do that. (sidenote: isn't that because you have 2-step-auth turned on? how would you like it to work, given your circumstances?)
I don't have two step auth on, but it wanted to check my number anyway, which was fine with me. If they'd set a longer timeout it would have been find with me.
Can't vouch for the rest of the comment but I have to drive between one and two miles from home to answer my phone. One mile gets me to a nearby park and two miles gets me to the university where I work; there's not much else in between.
I'm not quite that bad off but I do have to stand next to a particular window at one end of my house to get 1 bar on the signal meter. Text message generally work throughout the house but to make a voice call with any hope of clarity I need to stand by that window.
I can confirm our service is having issues right now with delayed inbound emails. We are Google Apps for Business users, non edu/gov. Not all users are effected just specific domains within the account.
At least with my cloud servers if there is an issue I at least get an idea of what is going on or an expectation of resolution. Google... what is really going on that an issue remains unresolved for 3-4hrs impacting paying users.
I know this is nitpicking but this datum is at least confusing:
"The average (median) delay was just 2.6 seconds, but some mail was more severely delayed. However, this issue did not affect users' access to the Gmail page or other functionality."
What does "some" mean in Google's order of magnitude?
A median time without the maximum and minimum is not quite useful, as a mean time without more data.
This is really killing my productivity today. I don't like being so reliant on email, but I work remotely, so it's a necessary evil. Having worked in operations for prominent companies, I sympathize with the gmail team right now, but my patience is wearing thin with the problem approaching the 5 hour mark.
So, at the 2012 I/O conference Google announced there were 425million gmail users. I'll tack an extra 75million to make things an even 500mil for growth over the last year. That's 12million affected users.
Based on my experience this morning, I'd say that 15% of our 300 or so Gmail users over about 25 domains were effected. In my opinion, their initial estimate was way too low and seemed dismissive.
9/23/13 4:00 PM
Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.
I was wondering why my emails on my phone weren't going through of a server I took pictures of this morning, and then I was getting 'rejected by server' emails after that.
That announcement at least tells me something is going on, but i am not seeing a disruption. I have a total outage. I cannot even get to the login page.
I argued up and DOWN with people about us switching to google apps for our email.
Up until recently, we were hosting our own mail on a server in our switch room.
"It's more reliable!" I would insist.
Well...it hasn't been more reliable. There has been more than one longish-term downtime that I can remember since we switched over.
When I was hosting it myself, I could give people status updates, an estimate for when it would be fixed, some kind of explanation.
Now, all I can give them is "it's broken. I don't know why, and google isn't telling anybody why."
Very frustrating, especially considering how much we pay every month for it.