Off the grid
Saturday, October 31st, 2009My primary link to the rest of the cosmos—my Gmail account, bqpqpoly at gmail.com—has been down for more than 36 hours. I get a “502 Server Error” every time I try to log in, from any computer and any browser.
Any Shtetl-Optimized readers at Google: care to fix this for me? (Or is this some sort of Halloween prank, or a paternalistic attempt to force me to stop answering emails and finish my STOC submissions?)
If you need to reach me in the meantime, please write to ghh1729 at gmail.com. (If you understand both “bqpqpoly” and “ghh1729,” I’ll even guarantee you a response.)
Update (9PM Saturday): To be clear, the issue for me is not so much the outage itself, as the lack of any acknowledgment or response from Google. (According to the Register article, even those who are paying $50 for “Premier” service can’t get through to Google’s support line, which is advertised as being 24-hour.) I would like not merely a fix, but a personal apology from Larry and Sergey, and an explanation of what steps they’re taking to uphold the “don’t be evil” creed in the future.And to the many CS majors who read this blog: is this the sort of unresponsive corporate behemoth you want to work for? 🙂
Update (4PM Sunday): OK, Google has finally acknowledged the problem.
Update (6PM Sunday): Woohoo, my email is back! But I’m missing everything from the last few days—so if you tried to mail me over the weekend, please resend. Thanks!Google claims that this problem affected only 0.001% of Gmail users. All I can say is that they picked the wrong 0.001%. 🙂
I’m pretty sure that this is the longest I went without accessing my inbox since 1994.
My revised view: Google is not an evil behemoth. They’re a good company, and would be a great one if it didn’t take hundreds of people 40 hours to get through to them when something goes extremely wrong.