Google Apps Status Check

Today was another big Gmail failure. From time to time the email service goes down, and people freak out.

We tend to be very dependent on email now. If our email goes out, we tend to feel very limited in our connection and communications with people.

I actually never suffered an outage, but because of the news about it all, I discovered that Google has a status page for its services. If you can’t log into Gmail or Gtalk, or your various Google Docs and you are wondering if it’s just you or the system is down you can go take a look at the Apps Status Dashboard.

It will give you information on whether the service is down, if there is a critical system wide error, or just some repairs that will make your account temporarily unavailable.

These incidents should give us pause about using services from “the cloud”. How dependent are you on services that are not sitting on your hard drive, but exist out there on the internet? What if you have no internet? What if the service goes bankrupt?

That’s why I am a bit hesitant to really buy into the web services as software idea. I like knowing that the program sits on my hard drive. A copy is on physical media.

Oh, and a need alternative to the Apps Status Dashboard that is useful for all online services, and websites in general is down for everyone or just me. Here you type in the web address you are trying to go to, and the website will tell you if they are unable to access it as well.