February 25, 2009 by James Oliver
In the early hours of Tuesday morning (US time) Gmail was fully offline for several hours, this would have been embarrassing enough but when the popular email site finally resurfaced it’s IM function, Google Talk was hit by a phishing attack. The two are not thought to be linked though their joint appearance did create a particularly embarrassing morning for Google. The website responsible for the attack, ViddyHo.com, was swiftly identified and blacklisted, though the PR furore surrounding the outage will probably prove a harder storm to weather.
On the face of it, an outage of a few hours might not seem that big a deal, though the rules are different for Google – predictably the blogosphere degenerated into an orgy of hand-wringing and complaining. Users of a site or online application hate when it goes down and cause quite a fuss, particularly when it’s a big site that they rely on. Remember the anger when eBay had problems with outages?
It’s important to keep this in perspective however, Gmail hasn’t gone down for quite some time and probably won’t again for ages either. Outages are simply part of life these days and Google is better than most
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