The cloud turned dark this morning for people in Europe when some Web-delivered apps from Google Inc., including corporate and individual Gmail, crashed worldwide. Users in Britain noticed the outage first, which began at 5:30 a.m. Eastern time and lasted for about three hours.
As to how widespread the issue really was, Google isn’t saying. “Many” were affected, the company said on the Gmail status page. Regardless of hard numbers, it does point out the underlying fear companies have when it comes to transitioning to cloud computing: What if it goes down?
A similar issue arose when Amazon Web Services crashed last year for two hours, stranding thousands of Web businesses that use Amazon for storage services and calling into question the wisdom of the technology approach.
It’s an apropos question to mull over considering that Microsoft, Amazon, Ubuntu, Verizon Business and others are rolling out cloud environments, while mobile broadband, smartphones and netbooks are enabling Internet-hosted applications to cross the chasm. Meanwhile, everyone is looking to mine the trend. But business users need more than best efforts.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for service providers to bring their networks and quality monitoring to a partnership arrangement, and for data backup and redundancy services to thrive.
Google said that corporate customers that pay for the Google Apps service benefit from an SLA-like guarantee that says Gmail uptime is 99.9 percent. So far it has stayed within the parameters, Google noted.
