Not often you get a company as big and powerful as Google to admit they messed up. The major problems experienced by Google Apps users in August, however, prompted Google to step up and reassure their users that they are working harder to provide better service.
The outages on July 30 and August 6 were mere blips compared to the one on August 11, when there was a major outage that caused a widespread panic among Google users at home and abroad.
John Proffitt, IT services director at APTI, commented on how hard it was for him, as Google Apps admin, to do his own job, as of course his email was down as well.
Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager posted an apology on the official Gmail blog, saying that the problem was fixed, and a full review was being done.
A collective sigh of relief went up, which promptly turned to growls of outrage when another outage occurred only a few days later, shaking consumer faith and prompting many to Twitter their irritation once again.
Google is handy to use – almost too handy, with it’s myriad online applications that encourage you to run everything through Google email, Docs, and attending interfaces.
When it crashes, it’s like having your office drop through a hole in the floor, and many felt betrayed by the unreliability of their service.
Google, in an attempt to soothe and reassure, decided to publicly admit ‘we made mistakes in August, and we’re sorry.’ They went on to mention that they do have an extensive team to get things back to normal and that users should not fear outages.
Some new and upcoming features were brought up, presumably to try and wheedle everyone into an only mildly disgruntled silence ( and a 15 day credit was to be applied to Premier customer accounts).
New features presumably are to include:
** A dashboard to keep you inform of system status in the event of future outages (in other words, it’s gonna happen but they’ll try to keep you updated as to ETR and measures they are taking to fix it).
** A formal incident report if necessary, to be delivered within 24 hours of problem resolution. This will let you know exactly how bad the outage was, what caused it and what steps have been taken to prevent another occurrence.
** In depth conversations about the outage should your team or company require in depth dialogue.
Hopefully we won’t see a lot of these features any time soon.
Tags: August, gmail, Google Apps, outages