Gmail down for two hours, experts urge business users to have a plan B

Google’s free Gmail service suffered an outage overnight for the second time in a year, leaving millions of individuals and businesses unable to access their email accounts.

The service appears to have been brought down in Italy, Germany, France and several countries across Asia including Taiwan.

Australian accounts seem to have been unaffected, but some users reported on discussion forums and Twitter they were unable to access Gmail early this morning.

The problem now appears to have been fixed, with a Google spokesperson saying the outage lasted for about one hour and forty-five minutes.

“The problem with Google Mail should be resolved,” the company wrote in a status update at 7.37 AEST. “We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

It is the second major outage for the service after a similar incident occurred in February, leaving millions of users across Britain and the rest of Europe unable to access their email accounts.

The incident comes at a bad time for the company, as it has embarked on a massive campaign to convince businesses to move to the online Google Apps suits as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

But several businesses which have replaced their traditional software with software-as-a-service offerings such as Google Apps were unable to continue with business as usual during the outage.

Two major media groups in Britain, the Telegraph Media Group and The Guardian, have moved to the Google Apps suite and were unable to use email for hours. Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz apologised on the site’s blog for the problem.

“We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could… Obviously we’re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence.”

Steve Hodgkinson, research director at IT analysis firm Ovum, says the outage proves why businesses which use SaaS offerings need to have back-up plans.

“I always say to people that cloud computing doesn’t change the reality of the situation that you need to have a plan B. There will be outages in the cloud, the same way there are outages on any electricity network. Any operational service will have outages, so from a business point of view you need to keep critical data backed up on site somehow. It all comes down to traditional business continuity planning.”

David Hodges, chief executive of SaaS provider Smartpath, says the incident “raises questions” about how businesses need to go about introducing SaaS into their day-to-day operations.

“There’s certainly a risk in doing this sort of thing. But I don’t think just staying on site is the answer. Having multiple back up plans is good for this sort of thing, but I think putting more data on a business’s location and just having the IT team handle it, I don’t know if that is as effective as software-as-a-service.”