The Gmail’s influence to internet users ‘help’ spreading its own outage news everywhere. Of course it appear on Techmeme too, the place where I first learned about the outage.

Fortunately for me and probably most Gmail users on other countries beside US and UK, Gmail stay online and available. Online and available means, Gmail URL is accessible and you can send and receive email as usual.

The outage issue seems to be sporadic and variety. Certain users affected cannot even open the Gmail URL, while other users can open Gmail, but unable to send or receive email. Even Gmail’s IMAP service is reported working as usual. At this point of time, the root cause still under investigation as pointed out on Gmail blog.

While Gmail outage has tarnished its reputation, at least there is something positive behind it. The real savior here is the newly launched Offline Gmail, which allow users to least read recent emails. It passed the first critical test today!!

Moral of the story? Regardless how great something is, as long as it is human invention,  it is far from perfect. It will break one day.

But most importantly,  don’t forget to keep the copy of your emails somewhere else especially if it is work related. There are many option out there to choose from. Use email client such as Thunderbird, Outlook, online storage, or simply utilize Offline Gmail.

Update 25/2 : Outage is over. Root cause is under investigation