Yesterday evening when I was getting ready to check two papers that had come into my Gmail account I was surprised to find myself locked out of my account. Presumably I was not the only person, the failure was widespread. It is also worth pointing out that while email services were resumed fairly quickly, the chat failure took a lot longer to correct.

In the end, it wasn’t too catastrophic and I did manage to get to the aforementioned assignments, but by the time that I got there I was tired and disinterested and put off the two or three hours of work until today. It is an inconvenience that I can live with but it did provide food for thought. Are people relying too heavily on free webmail providers for their communications? Gmail has proved too convenient to resist, particularly with all of the filtering options that it has. But it only took one untimely 30-minute disruption for me to realize that it makes a lot of sense to have a backup plan.

Did anyone else notice last night’s downtime?

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