GMail’s down and out again

GMail is suffering yet another outage and Google officials say it could last as long as 36 hours for some people. The outage started early this morning, and while Google says the problem was partially fixed for some people, an undetermined amount still are without access to their email. Google has so far declined to explain what caused this latest outage but a spokeman did explain why they often take so long to fix:

Asked why some Gmail outages last more than 24 hours, Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google’s Enterprise, told IDG News Service in November 2008 that those instances are “very rare.”

“Where there are problems is in the cases where we can’t fail that user over [to the backup] for whatever reason — there’s an error with the account, or the master and the slave [copies] are out of sync. So in a few circumstances, we have been unable to fail a user over and we can’t restore that user’s access to the service until we restore that physical location. This is an area where we’re constantly getting better and some of the things we’ve done as a result of our learnings over the last few months address that,” he added.

GMail has been plagued with numerous outages. In August 2008 the users of the service suffered through three separate outages. The first, on August 6th, affected Apps Premier users, who were hit with another outage on August 15th. The third outage occurred on August 11th and also affected AP members. Then in October another outage hit, knocking out email service for 30 hours. The latest was just 2 weeks ago when a major outage cut most of GMail’s users off from their email for nearly 3 hours.