How Did You Deal With The Gmail Failure?

Many may remember the morning of Tuesday, September 2, as a time when Gmail had an OOPS. How did you deal the Gmail failure? Do you have a backup plan for accessing your email if this happens again? The outage on the Gmail servers was a surprise to users and even the Gmail technical team.

Image: SXC.hu

According to the Gmail Blog, it was unexpected because their infrastructure runs on servers in multiple locations around the world. It was even reported that their server plan was recently updated to so that a crash such as that happened wouldn’t happen.

However it did happen and many users were upset about it and even sent messages on Twitter and other social networks to see if others were affected. A good thing is that within seconds the Gmail technical team was alerted to the problem and they quickly responded. I totally appreciate the Gmail technical team having such a quick response.

For some, Gmail is their only way to check their email because it can be used to pull in email from other services as well as the Gmail accounts. So when this problem happened, their email communications were severely interrupted. When I realized that there was a problem with Gmail, I immediately opened up Zimbra and gained access to all of my email. I even had access to my Gmail because I have Zimbra setup with IMAP connection so those emails that had already downloaded to my computer, I was able to review.

If you don’t have a backup plan such as what I mention above, I would highly suggest that you put one into place. Especially if you use Gmail for business purpose. You should have what I will term as a disaster recovery in case of Gmail failure again. I have the email software called Zimbra that allows me to setup multiple email address that I can access via desktop software.

Now I want to know, how did you deal with the Gmail outage? Please vote below.