Google: Sorry for Gmail outage; SMS Search 'sunset' long ago

BANGALORE, INDIA: Gmail users have been bugged by intermittent outages, so much so it was thrice in a span of last two weeks.

On May 13, the '502 Error' message was persistent for more than an hour for lot many users in India. The previous two occasions of Gmail outage were on May 2 and May 8. Even as they were trying to refresh the page, what they were getting to view was: "502. That's an error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds," before a gingerly quip, "That's all we know."

But a Google Apps Status Dashboard update on May 2 was a tad more polite, as it tried to reassure annoyed users. "The problem with Gmail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better. Users were experiencing 502 errors and latency when accessing email."

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly," it added.

In an earlier statement on Google Enterprise Blog, Venkat Panchapakesan, vice-president of Engineering, stated: "For customers using Google Apps for Business, Education or Government, we offer a 99.9% availability guarantee, with zero scheduled downtime for maintenance. In 2010 and 2011, the actual availability for Gmail was significantly better than this guarantee. This was true again last year." (sic)

"In 2012, Gmail achieved 99.983% availability while at the same time adding dozens of new features. This translates to an average of just over seven minutes of service disruption per month over the last year, and most users experienced no disruption at all," (sic) it added.

When CIOL checked on the now frequent non-availability of Gmail, a spokesperson replied along the same lines.

As for the shutdown of Google's SMS-based search option, which supposedly was not informed to users with a prior notice, we were told that "it was sunset a long time back" (sic) and that there was nothing new to it.