Oh my, now we truly have a Global Disaster -- GMail is Down!

As you may know, Team FREDNET utilizes Google Mail and Apps extensively amongst our globally distributed project members. Today we have been brought to a virtual standstill by a sudden outage in the Google Mail service. I am sure they will bring it back up shortly, but in the meantime I thought I'd take a minute to write something for our blog, and take this time to consider what other global technologies we have come to rely upon. It is always good to have a backup plan!

With more than 100 million users worldwide, I am wondering how much of an effect a Google Mail outage has on the world economy? How much productivity is lost when their servers are down? How many people now sit idly, waiting for the "Temporary Error (502)" to disappear and be replaced with their inboxes filled with delicious new technologies? How many people are now inundating twitter, and blogspot, plaxo, and LinkedIn instead? Can those sites handle the load? Or perhaps those affected have now taken a break to watch some of the Olympic Games in Beijing? How many are now playing FlashTrek?

Nevermind, I see that Google Mail is back online, so I now return you to your regularly scheduled Lunar Blogs.... I suppose this would have made for a more interesting video blog for our Team, but alas I do not have the camera here. A momentary pause from endless videos of Fred reading his email.

Happy Hacquing,
Fred

--
Fred J. Bourgeois, III
Leader, Team FREDNET -- http://xprize.frednet.org/
The First and ONLY 100% Open Source Competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize
"Just because it isn't easy doesn't mean it isn't fun."