Gmail Outage Outrage: Welcome to the Future

2 years ago

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Woman Up Editor

If you are one of the "more than a million companies and tens of millions of people in 52 languages" who use Gmail, you are acutely aware that the Google e-mail service was down Tuesday for most of the day (actually only 100 minutes, but in Internet time that is an eternity).

Secure in my Hotmail, I do not use the popular service. (My Woman Up colleague Emily Miller, an inveterate Gmail and Google Voice fan, will not rest until I switch, however, so that may change.) I imagine, though, that a day without Gmail, even just a small slice of the Google behemoth, had broad societal connotations. Despite being cut off from their server, Gmail users were hardly silenced. They could be found loudly complaining about the inconvenience in their Facebook status updates and on blogs all over the Internet. The twitterati kept each other up to date (still down!) through thousands of individual tweets.

I developed a love/hate relationship with electronic mail in the early 1990s. As a Senate Judiciary Committee staff person, early adopter of technology, and lover of both words and archives, I was hooked when the U.S. Senate implemented an intra-office computer mail system to communicate with staff members in other offices. The implications of records having a limitless half life became crystal clear some months later. Our messages to one another were accessed and retrieved from some dark computer mother ship in the bowels of the U.S. Capitol. Special investigators were searching for evidence of who leaked to the press Anita Hill's correspondence to the committee. It was about some misgivings regarding Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

They never did find out who told, but one colleague's slightly unflattering comment about the nominee's writing style was unearthed -- to the embarrassment of his boss. Since then, I've never written another e-mail that part of me didn't assess for potential backfires.

I stopped keeping up with new applications long ago. I have no patience and I break things, but even comparative Luddites have our electronic dependencies. On the same day the service outage was making Gmailers apoplectic, I was having my own uneasy realization that I will soon need to replace my outdated workhorse, Microsoft Outlook Express. The program organizes and stores my tens of thousands of accumulated e-mails. It's a sad fact that no matter how improved the overall effect may be, you always lose something in an upgrade.

The dusty old OE program has always been minimally supported by its designers, even less so than the Microsoft Outlook that once came bundled on new PCs. Most of my tech knowledge over the years has come by copying the exact words of error messages into search engines to find other frustrated users on line who could help me troubleshoot. When OE worked as intended, however, it kept my folders labeled by year and project, and divided into personal and work-related categories, always at my fingertips. When I found myself locked out because my software was "not optimally suited," I was bereft.

I will adjust somehow, but outages and unanticipated "upgrades" will continue to happen. As Arthur Koestler predicted long before we each had our own electronic brains, there are ghosts in the machines.

Filed Under: Woman Up

Tagged: gmail, mary, microsoft, outlook express, OutlookExpress

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