Google Gmail Service Crashes Today, But is Restored in a Few Hours

(image found on Telegraph.co.uk)
Earlier this morning Google's Gmail email service was hit with a major outage. The problem was fixed a few hours later. No additional information was made available about the outage. This glitch affected users in the US, UK as well as across most of Europe and even hitting people as far away as India and Australia.

"If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems," Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager, wrote in a blog post. "Shortly after 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their e-mail."

"We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience," Google said in a statement.

Customers who had enabled Gmail offline in the U.S. and the U.K. were able to access their inboxes during the outage, but they could not send or receive e-mail. An unrelated glitch earlier this month also sent some legitimate email to Gmail's spam folders.

Talk about a wow moment, I am glad to see they were on the ball and got things fixed quickly.

Google promises that customers paying for the Google Apps service will have access to Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time each month or Google has to pay a penalty. So far Google hasn't dipped below that, the company said last year.

The company took advantage of the problem to tout the new Gmail Labs feature that permits offline access to Gmail for customers in the U.S. and U.K. With it, people can read, search, label, and archive their e-mail and compose new messages, but of course messages aren't sent or received until network access is restored.

Outages pose problems for Google as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues its service availability is competitive with most organizations' abilities to run their own e-mail servers.

One good thing that came from this was that many "major companies, including Telegraph Media Group and The Guardian, have switched to using the Google Apps suite in place of conventional desktop email. Google Apps allows users to work collaboratively on documents via the web, as well as share calendars, and provides instant messaging and chat alongside Gmail email services."

So even though it was a minor inconvenience, things didn't just halt they just went to another venue until service was restored. It was a nice test under fire to see how things worked when it hit the fan. Great job getting things back up and running Google....

Google Gmail Restored After Service Outage Reported (eweek)
Google’s Gmail service crashes across world (Telegraph.co.uk)
Google Suffers Gmail Outage Early Tuesday (PCmag)
Google apologizes for Gmail outage (cnet)

Microsoft unveils Elevate America

(image found on nydailynews)

Link to Microsoft's Elevate America

Microsoft this past weekend unveilded a new program to help millions world wide for free. In a program called Elevate America, Microsoft is aiming to give 2 milion people over the next two years technology training at regional telecenters and online too.

The online resource is focused on helping users figure out what types of technical skills are required for IT jobs, and provides resources to help acquire these skills. The Web site offers access to several Microsoft online training programs, from very basic (e.g., "How to use the Internet") to much more advanced (e.g., "Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows XP Professional").

To provide a variety of training, Microsoft will partner with state and local governments. Florida, New York and Washington will be the first states to offer Elevate America courses.

Some 3.6 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007 with about half of the decline occurring in the past three months, according to recent Labor Department data.

"Millions of Americans don't have the technology skills needed in today's economy. Through Elevate America, we want to help workers get the skills they need to succeed," Pamela Passman, corporate vice president of Microsoft Global Corporate Affairs, said. "We are also providing a full range of workforce development resources for state and local governments so they can offer specialized training for their workers."

This is a great program to help bring in and educate a new workforce previously untapped. Computers and technology help us in so many ways and by educating the millions lacking we will prosper in so many new exciting ways that we never thought possible.

Microsoft Offers Free Tech Training To Millions (Channel Web)
Microsoft seeks to Elevate the nation's tech skills (beta news)
Need an edge in the job market? Microsoft wants to help - for free (nydaily news)
Microsoft Aims to Provide Tech Training to Americans (DailyTech)