If you’re a Google Apps user, you’ve probably seen the dreaded “Temporary Error (502)” message pop up from time to time. With the growing importance of remotely-hosted applications, the 502 has now become as (in)famous as the old Blue Screen of Death.
From Wednesday of last week until early Friday morning, a Gmail and Apps outage prevented many users from logging in. Google Apps is a hosted (and often free) suite of collaboration and communications programs. It has suffered numerous problems of late, as we’ve mentioned before.
The most recent outage caused many administrators grief as their end users—including high-ranking executives—complained about not having any service, according to a story by IDG News Service.
Administrators posted angry messages on a Google forum. One poster mentioned that his CEO was locked out of his e-mail for nearly a day. “I think I would have pushed for something else before we switched if I had known the level of this unreliability,” wrote the poster, “Bill W.”
IDG also says some Apps Start pages malfunctioned. Start pages are portals into Calendar, Gmail and other applications. In addition, it appears that Google—with little or no warning—changed its popular iGoogle homepage, causing troubles for many consumers and business users alike.
In another posting, a user identified as “Jay” asked: “Why must Google change things without letting administrators know in advance?”
Well, get used to it Jay. This unreliability will likely continue. And as more users flood to so-called cloud services, these problems will likely get worse.
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