Google Replies to Gmail Outage With15 day Refund and Dashboard
Yesterday’s Gmail and Google Apps outage, which lasted approximately 2 1/2 hours shows just what risky about putting everything in the cloud. For companies, it reduces the infrastructure they need to maintain internally, but if something like this happens — admittedly, rarely, at least for Google — it can really hurt.
While those who access free versions of Google’s products really shouldn’t expect any recompense, businesses, government agencies and other subscribers who pay for the Premier Edition of these services are being given a credit for 15 days of free service.
In response to its extended Gmail outage yesterday, Google has just launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard
. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance look at the system health of most popular Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and the company’s suite of web-based document editors. Google has been pretty good about responding to down time with blog posts alerting users with status updates, but having a dedicated page seems like a much better solution (especially for users who don’t follow Google’s blogs).
The news is in line with recent trends seen by other popular web services, like Twitter, which now offers its own dedicated Status Update. Given that users (especially business customers) are becoming increasingly reliant on Google’s cloud based services, this is a welcome move, though I’m hoping we won’t have to use it too often.
