Google’s Gmail service went down for about two hours Monday, once agan leaving thousands of users in the lurch. This time, however, Google communicated updates to users and even published an apology in its official Gmail Blog. Could it be turning a corner in customer service?
The blog post, titled “We feel your pain, and we’re sorry,” blames the outage on a problem with the contacts system that prevented Gmail from loading properly. Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, went on to say:
“We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.”
Google also posted interim updates as it sleuthed out the problem. That’s a lot better than a 502 error and silence. As more enterprises look to the cloud to handle real-world applications, Google needs to not only limit its downtime but also be far more proactive on customer service–and in this case, it did a lot better than in the past.
Still, the blogosphere was rife with commentary, ranging from a push to outfit Gmail with offline access through Gears, to urging Gmail users to pursue alternative backup e-mail providers, to simple rants. There was a bright side in all of this for Google, however. While Gmail was down for two hours, Apple’s e-mail service MobileMe experienced an outage at the same time but for a far longer period. And Apple was nowhere near as responsive to its customers, offering only a simple post when the outage was fixed, and even that was a bit premature. As the two look to compete against one another with the iPhone and Android, Gmail and MobileMe, Apple will need to do a better job in customer service or see its iPhone lead disappear. (Android phones are expected to be out by year end.)
