By all accounts, yesterdays GMail outage was pretty big. It just so happens that I ranked in the first few results in the SERPs for keywords related to the outage. The traffic influx was huge.

Media Temple (the SKFox.com host) uses a system called GPUs or Grid Processing Units to give you a good idea of how much CPU, I/O, and disk space you are using on their system. Yesterdays spike is fairly obvious.

Mint, from haveamint.com, gave me my first clue as to what was going on. While I like the depth of Google Analytics, the real time stats from my Mint installation are priceless.

SKFox.com normally gets about 100 visitors per day. At the peak of the outage, I was getting about 23 per minute. That’s awesome, but hopefully there isn’t another repeat anytime soon.

Earlier this week I saw about 300 visits over a 24 hour period from people searching for solutions to the error message they were getting when logging into Gmail. I have seen over 800 in the last hour. Sure enough, my gmail is out too with a Temporary Error (502). POP3 seems to be working. Following my survival guide, I checked the Gmail google group. The issue for today, 11 August 2008, is a known issue with the web interface, they acknowledge that POP3 and IMAP are still working.

Here is to all of you and myself, let us hope it comes back up soon.

Update 1: Mine is back up after about an hour. Anybody else?

Update 2: 2,000+ hits in an hour because of this. Media Temple server holding up nicely.

Previous outages

• March 2008
• May 2008
• July 2008

Help

• Surviving Gmail 502 outages
• Gmail alerts and annoucements

Other coverage

• Techcrunch: Systemwide GMail Outage
• CNET: Gmail is down, Twitter sizzling
• Mashable: GMail is Down