Gmail becomes #gfail on twitter

Gmail becomes #gfail on twitter and...

Very surprising thing happened. Gmail was down.

Gmail users were popping all sorts of questions - from IMAP, logging in, 502 failure, etc.

My point is even though it was down for quiet sometime, the problem is people paniced and they had a reason to panic. Tuesday afternoon, at least in India, people working are primarily using gmail, as an email service provider.

People were behaving as we use to behave in our hostel - shouting, hooting, crying, yelping, end very possible sound that no animal had heard before.

5 types of people being effected by gmail:

Happy go lucky - Some of us were happy, too happy, not working.

Non-impressed - The new comers were in state of shock, not being able to impress their bosses, will have to stay late today too; important news announcement going via sms or phone calls.

Extended Lunchers - the other went out for an extended lunch, i think they even had beer. Sniff! Sniff!

Hurling abusive types - Then there were people who were actually panicing, "mail is not going, call the IT guy", "attachment not happening, "where is Rakesh (IT guy), when you need him the most??". Hurling abuses at the internet at start, later to relaise that it was not the internet but Uncle Google's gmail was down.

Hopefuls - Gmail will be back soon, this has never happened before.

Scary ones - what if the mails are deleted? what if there are reducing the storage space? what my contact list gets deleted? what if they never come back on? is there are problem with google? This one you need to care off, since they are already in a break down state and people dont have these answers to their questions, then it becomes very contagious. PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THESE TYPES.

Anyway, the good news is Gmail is back. the only request that i would make to the Gmail / Google team, please do make announcements prior. I do not deny, the announcement did come in, but it was quiet delayed on http://mail.google.com/support/ . It surely calm the nerves of some people on twitter stream, which was going berserk on two key words gmail and #gfail. There were more than 127 tweets in less than 0.02 secs (at one time, that i saw) - that was the speed. Dont think even Oscars did that much - the last global topic of discussion.

When twitter was down, we would go all over the place - facebook, gtalk, email (gmail), blog about it. When gmail was down talking about it on Twitter.

Dear GMAIL, please dont do this to us again, please take backups of backups, or else we will go back to communicating through hand signals.