A week ago, many Google Calendar users were affected by an extended outage. Today, it’s down again, and this time it’s affecting the majority of users. And it’s been going on for well over an hour now. Ugh.
We’ve reached out to Google to see what the issue is this time (and why this keeps happening) and will update when we hear back. The Google App Status Dashboard has two updates so far. At 8:30 they wrote:
We’re aware of a problem with Google Calendar affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 9:00:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
And then at 9:00 they wrote:
Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 9:30:00 AM UTC-7 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.
While the web page for Calendar appears to be loading, none of the actual calendar data is.
All services have downtime from time to time (cable, the phone company, etc), the problem is that Google is trying to get everyone to trust that they can move all their data to the cloud. When a pattern of downtime keeps occurring, obviously, that’s going to be a harder sell.
Update: A new update on the App Status Dash says that they’re still looking into the issue:
Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by May 6, 2010 10:00:00 AM UTC-7 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.
Update 2: Google has updated the Dashboard again saying the issues has been resolved. Here’s the message:
The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.
Additionally, Google got back to me, pointing to this page for a full report about last week’s outage (see the PDF linked to on that page).