If you follow tech blogs then you could hardly fail to have noticed the reaction the other day when Gmail went down for the total time period of about 1-2 hours.

The screenshot below shows the feeds in my RSS reader.

Pretty much the same thing happened when Amazon hosting services went down a few weeks ago for 8 hours or so; a huge over-reaction of from the blogosphere; dire warnings about cloud computing and questions over the quality of service.

Anyone else wonder about this? Think it’s just a little bit of an over-reaction?

I know it’s been a pretty quiet week for tech news, without not much more substantial then vague and questionable Apple rumours but does that really excuse jumping on something like this?

Perhaps if this was a regular, Twitter-style, occurrence then yes, it’s a concern. However Gmail has been a very stable service for the whole 4 years it’s been sitting in it’s perpetual beta.

Sure, if you are using Gmail for as your main corporate email solution it would be a hassle, not question. However the real issue here seems to be that people are using the service with no thought at all for any kind of back-up solution.

Google may be selling itself as a Microsoft alternative for office products, but that doesn’t make it free from the occasional issue, a good manager should realise this and have appropriate measures in place.

As Alan Patrick so succinctly put it:

Apparently howls of outrage have been heard all over Twitter even. We awaits with interest to see how the Cloudpimps will spin this one…..
We hate to say We Told You So ……. but we did – so, here it is again – free advice, may save a lot of hassle in future:

(i) Ensure you have copies on your own systems of any cloud data
(ii) Ensure you have redundancy in all critical systems
(iii) Pay for any critical path systems – its usually a false economy to go free.