Gmail Down; Cloud Takes a Beating

Guess what, boys and girls! If you use Gmail, you already know: the system has crashed again, in the middle of the business day. According to Google's (GOOG) Apps Status Dashboard, the system has well and truly crashed, so all those endless "what's up with gmail" tweets now have an answer. And TechCrunch writer Nik Cubrilovic is none too happy about it. "I use Apps For Domain for everything—my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone," he writes. "As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google. It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers. This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications."

This is the second time this year that a Gmail glitch paralyzed electronic communications around the world; in February, Gmail collapsed during Europe's business day. Last year, Gmail crashed three times in one month. As hair-pulling promptly commences throughout the country, cloud computing's reputation takes yet another hit.