Gmail outage

On Tuesday, the first day of school, Gmail went down for approximately 100 minutes, starting at 2:30 PM local time. Obviously, this was not a great way to initiate the district's first full day of business after migrating all email systems to Google Apps Gmail. Thanks for your patience.

I knew going into this that Google Apps would have some outages (like any system), so this didn't make me second-guess the decision. It was just the unfortunate coincidence of happening on the first day of school, the first day back after migrating, that made me slap my forehead.

A couple benefits of using Gmail include:

1. Compared to our old email system, Google Apps Gmail is still online a higher percentage of time.
2. When it goes down, it makes national news. This is because it goes down so rarely, and also because so many people use it.
3. Google Apps has a Service Level Agreement of 99.9% uptime for its customers. If it doesn't meet that, it loses money. So there were a whole lot of people working very hard to get it back online.

If you are interested in reading the causes of the outage, you can read the official Gmail blog post. In the future, if you want to check the status of Oregon's IT services, (since we can't email you when email is down), you can check our blog (you are reading it now).

You can also see the global status of Google Apps at http://google.com/appsstatus