Digital Prank

Gmail one of the most celebrated free email service  crashed last night leaving users denied access for few hours. I happened to know this information through twitter and have seen lot of twitter messages using words ‘Gmail Down’ and ‘Gfail’  broadcasting this epic failure. Though Gmail reportedly crashed couple of times last year this one is huge and the failure halted the users from using Gmail for 2.5 hours last night. The crash happened yesterday at 8:30 Sydney Time which lasted for 2.5 hours.

Google has apologized for the outage officially through a post in The Official Google blog. Thanks to Gmail offline which Google introduced last January which helped the users to access past emails during the outage period. Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager wrote “We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.” in a post at Official Google blog. By this time users across the world would have realized the importance of Gmail Offline access and POP3 or IMAP account usage using clients like Thunderbird and Outlook Express. To compensate what happened,today Google has announced that it will extend the subscriptions of Google Apps premier edition users by 15 days in Google’s Associated Press.