Google's Latest Outage Clouds Data Plan

By Tom Dunlap

Google's latest embarrassing Gmail outage has me wondering about the company's ambitious cloud computing imitative.

The Gmail service was down for two and a half hours worldwide this morning, starting at 1:30 am. Google was at first slow to respond to the problem, then later apologized in its blog. 

The problem is this: The search giant is pushing its cloud computing plan, which calls on consumers to store all their data -- from spread sheets to documents -- on the company's servers and then access that data online.

But if you're about to put your mission-critical data in Google's cloud, and then that cloud rains on you, what kind of trust is that going to foster?

Here's some of what the search giant had to say about the outage, along with its apology:

Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in what's called a 'CAPTCHA' which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step -- it's just to verify you are who you say you are.

The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

Obviously we're never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.