Over the last few years I’ve been a strong advocate of moving most of my computing the cloud based services. I’ve been using Gmail for all my email, including my business email. I use Google Reader now for all my RSS feeds and often I’m using Google Docs to share files with colleagues. I’m also a big fan of using social networking sites like Facebook to consolidate alot of my social communications like photo sharing and status updates…
Recently though I’ve had a few bad experience with cloud services and I think its important these services to have good systems in place for outages. The most recent was with Facebook. On Friday it seems Facebook decided to enforce a new policy of not allowing test accounts as application developers. I’d read different reports about using test accounts as developers and the Facebook wifi indicates that its not supported. As part of this new enforcement Facebook decided to disable all applications that had test accounts as developers. In our case this effected 4 applications that we’ve developed, 3 of which were for 4 clients. One application was just launching and we were able to contact someone at Facebook to get it re-enabled. One application was still in developer so we re-created new application keys without any problems. The last 2 are still missing and have now been offline for 4 days. Not great in terms of a customer service experience and I think really highlights the need for better customer service with Facebook…
And then this morning I’ve been having a hard time getting into my Gmail account. When I try to login I get a 502 error ( temporary web problem, try again ) and Gmail displays the following message:
This seems to be taking longer than usual.
If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.
If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information.
Which sounds like there is a problem with my internet connection. A quick visit to the “Google help center” leads to nothing useful but after a quick search of the Gmail discussion forum I find this:
Gmail Alerts Manager  |
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 (1 user) Mar 24, 1:54 pm |
errors upon login. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Thanks for your patience.