GMail Massive Outage
A couple of days ago, GMail suffered a massive outage. I was not affected or to be more precise, I checked my GMail account when the service was up and running again. However, the main reason is simply that my GMail account is in fact dormant. My active webmail account is Yahoo! When I read the news of this latest outage of GMail, I remembered that Facebook went down a couple of months ago. The lesson from this is simple: we should not take our personal infrastracture for granted! Things can go wrong for each and everyone of those services that we use on a daily basis.
What then can you do? First, I think it’s a good idea to have more than one webmail account. In case of trouble, you can switch to the running service. Hopefully, these kind of outage won’t happen to all your services at once. Other risks exists: privacy of your data, spam, viruses, you name it.
Now, how do you choose the best combination for you? It all depends of what you do online. My first webmail account was Hotmail, long before Microsoft bought this company. I had to terminate this account because of excessive spamming. I have no regret. I then moved on to Yahoo! Mail. Then came GMail with an offering of 2 gigabytes. I liked that but was troubled by the fact that the service is in permanent Beta. Also, I was not that enthusiastic about the “thread” concept of GMail. In the mean time, Yahoo! introduced a new version that delivered a richer experience. For me, there was no reason to switch.
Stumble it!
