GMail, an online application we all care about deeply here at StarterTech, suffered an outage yesterday that kept some people from accessing their email for approximately 15 hours.  While cloud computing may be all the rage, this does raise the spectre of what one does when they can’t access said cloud.

I have personally thought the cloud is a great idea, the ability to access my data from anywhere is always a plus, but sadly it isn’t always going to be the most stable.  No Internet access and you have no cloud.  If a service goes down, as GMail did, no cloud.  The thing is that I expect these hiccups.  It’s just part of the nature of being a computer user.

While poeple are quick to pile on the hatred and anger when something like this happens, I would also remind them that their computer goes down from time to time.  An application gets corrupted, your hard drive fails, your internet goes down so you can’t even retrieve you mail, all of these things can, and do, happen.  I would also remind them that GMail, for most users, is free.  Yes, there are bigger accounts you can pay for, but the vast majority of users is using the free iteration of the application, and it’s hard to complain when you aren’t even paying for it.

Luckily this outage seemed to have been very limited in scope, but it does teach a valuable lesson that this can, and will, happen sometimes.