Gmail Crash Casts Doubt on Cloud

First Google inadvertently suckered the world into imagining that Atlantis was found near the Canary Islands. Now, this morning, it accidentally ground business in Europe to a halt. At 9:30 a.m. London time, Google's Gmail system crashed, leaving people unable to access their inboxes or at least forcing them to wait for more than a minute, prompting people to quit the program in frustration. This may have been only a mild hassle for Americans with a yen for nocturnal correspondence, but for Europeans, who had just started work when the technical problems cropped up, the crash was a disaster.

Google has already fixed the problem and profusely apologized for the snafu. But leaving businesses without e-mail for as long as four hours has seriously damaged consumer confidence in Gmail. Moreover, the crash also affected Google Docs*, the suite of cloud-based word-processing and spreadsheet software that Google hopes will supplant Microsoft Office as the software of choice for companies around the world.

This isn't the first time Google's e-mail system has gone down. Last year, PC World points out, Gmail crashed three separate times in August, leaving the system dead for two hours at one point. In addition, the word-processing software Google Docs crashed for an hour last July, leaving thousands of people unable to perform basic writing and editing that is key to their work.

New York Times blogger Saul Hansell uses this incident to point out how many alternatives to e-mail have cropped up recently, noting that people could still use Facebook and Twitter to send messages. But if this sort of event happens more often, Google's e-mail and apps brands could be seriously damaged, and people who are just getting used to the cloud computing model could be spooked right back to Microsoft. If one glitch in the ether can leave millions of people unable to work, they will question the wisdom of keeping their files and software on a system based on servers operating in tandem around the world. And they'll once again wonder if it's really such a good idea to rely on Google for everything.

* This post originally referred to Google Docs as Google Apps. Regret the error.