Rut-roh - Gmail is totally down

Google's Gmail service is still in beta, but I've been relying on it as my only e-mail service for a couple of months now. Google's built a huge reputation for reliability, and for good reason: on every computer I use, I keep a folder called \broken -- and in all the years I've been using Google, I've only collected one or two Google failures.


Gmail has been a different story. So far I've encountered several failures -- and right now it's been down for 30 minutes. That's right, Gmail is just plain down. At one point, instead of the Server Error boilerplate, there was an actual Error 404.


Google is reputed to have an amazing, global, self-healing file system with 100,000 servers running at data centers around the world. This outage surprises me. I guess every time I sign onto Gmail, I need to look very closely at that tiny word BETA in the logo.