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Last Tuesday, Sept. 9, the Internet erupted with reports that Gmail had crashed completely. Users trying to access their mail over the Web were given a blank page, perpetually loading nothingness or one of several error messages.
Many Gmail users panicked, the twittering masses tweeted and retweeted their displeasure, the influential tech blogs tracked the story as it developed and the productivity of the Internet may have decreased slightly for the roughly 100 minutes of complete downtime. Although there were workarounds for savvy users (POP and IMAP access never fully crashed), even Google’s own engineers attempting to fix the problem were apparently stymied by the inaccessibility of their e-mail accounts.
Reactions were mixed. Many felt that Google was failing in its duty to provide the promised “efficient and useful” e-mail platform it advertises.
“This is a huge fail for Google,” wrote Nik Cubrilovic on the popular blog TechCrunch.
“Gmail being down momentarily is a pain … Gmail being down this long is downright unacceptable!” declared Twitter user thunderberry with a sentiment shared with thousands of other users.
So what responsibility does Google — and other free online services including Microsoft’s Windows Live mail, Yahoo mail, etc. — have to keep its service reliable to its users?
Users can’t expect perfection; it’s widely understood and accepted that software and hardware will never be flawless. Unanticipated problems can be planned for, but by their nature cannot be eliminated. Sometimes the fault lies in the technology itself, and sometimes the problems are external and unavoidable. Internet applications like Gmail are especially hard to maintain, as they include so many potential points of failure and so much variability in how users access the service and utilize it.
Businesses have accepted these facts and base their expectations on certain goals of availability. Gmail itself is used by many organizations and universities and in the contract for the service, Google promises its business users 99.9 percent uptime in a “service level agreement” — in other words, in any given 30-day month, Gmail will be unavailable for no more than 43.2 minutes total.
But regular Gmail users aren’t paying for Gmail, don’t have any agreements and have never been promised a certain amount of uptime. Regardless, by promoting Gmail as a reliable service, creating a relationship with the user and ultimately using Gmail to generate revenue, Google is morally if not legally required to keep its service highly available to its users.
In fact, Google acknowledged as much in July 2009 when Google officially removed the “beta” from Gmail’s name. In the world of software naming, certain conventions are used to describe the state of the software’s maturity. When initially conceived and not ready for regular use, the label “pre-alpha” or “alpha” is applied. Users know that “alpha” software is generally unreliable and under development.
When a product is in “beta,” it signifies that users can try the software, but should expect hiccups and bugs to crop up every so often. “Beta” was the level at which Gmail remained from its initial release on April 1, 2004 until July 7, 2009. Once the “beta” label is removed, the software should be ready for the masses and almost completely bug-free, and users should expect relatively smooth operation.
Essentially, Gmail is the United States Postal Service of the 21st century. With a few exceptions, the information conveyed through e-mail is equivalent to snail mail. Presumably, Americans would be outraged if the postal service experienced an outage and simply couldn’t deliver mail.
Luckily, Google appears to understand its charge. Todd Jackson, Gmail’s product manager, wrote on the Gmail blog, “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the e-mails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends and we saw the many Twitter posts. … We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.”
By volunteering itself as a carrier of crucial, time-sensitive information and using it to profit, Gmail must deliver its messages. While it may not be legally obligated to deliver mail, Google seems to understand that e-mail can’t be taken lightly. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night nor router problems can cause Google to allow its mail to stop being delivered. And the stakes are especially high for Google — if Google fails again, users can, unlike with the postal service, simply switch to the next company.
