#gmaildown was the trending topic on Friday, just before 11am PDT (around Saturday 3am Singapore time) and the outage lasted about 50 minutes.
Techcrunch wrote,
“Gmail is currently experiencing what appears to be a widespread outage, with reports coming in from Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and beyond that Google’s email service is down. We’re still seeing a green light (update: now showing red as of around 2:20 ET) on the App Status dashboard, but are trying to find out more about the problem.
The error being seen by most users at the moment is a (500) code problem, which pretty much just indicates that it’s a temporary problem and doesn’t give a clue as to cause. Judging by the response on Twitter, however, the problem is currently affecting a huge number of users. Google+ is also down, although you’d be forgiven for not having noticed that sooner.”
Email has become an essential part of business organisations and any outages could results in losses for the company, in terms of both revenue and productivity.
When businesses email and other forms of electronic communications, internal or outsource, goes down, losses can be quantified as such (Source: Forrester Inc):
A. Productivity
Number of employees – 1,000
Average burdened salary per employee per hour – $50
Approximate employee productivity impact – 20%
Total productivity losses – $10,000
B. Revenue
Annual revenue generation of the service – $10,000,000
Hourly revenue generation of the service – $1,142
Total revenue losses – $1,142
C. Customer Impact
Number of customers affected – 100 (Average number of customers who corresponded via email per hour)
Total cost of downtime due to messaging outages – $11,142
Outages could also cost the businesses that goes beyond dollars and cents. Here is a list of things that can impact businesses during an email outage:
- Revenue losses
- Impact to cash flow
- Productivity losses
- Compliance and/or reporting penalties
- Penalties and loss of discounts
- Impact to customers and strategic partners
- Employee morale and employee confidence in IT
- Damage to reputation and goodwill
As you can see, businesses can no longer afford even a second of downtime and outages today.
IT monitoring acts an insurance against downtime by monitoring the entire network infrastructure. NetGain Systems solutions also employs preventive and proactive alerts which can assist the IT team to identify possible sources before they become major outages.
