The Day the World Ended

nickmccabe 🙁 RT @jennispinner 2000yrs ago we lived in tents and had to catch/kill our food. Now, we curl up into the fetal position when Gmail’s down.

I’m sure you already know Gmail went down today. Well, to be precise, the web interface went down. IMAP, POP3, and the API remained available, however users who hadn’t enabled access for the former 2 options (such as myself) found themselves cut off from all access to their Gmail. Many of us rely on Gmail for our work, so it was more than a nuisance for us.

I spent the downtime with half an eye on a live Twitter feed for all things Gmail. Some of what came through was amusing:

JulieLech Haha > RT @FamousDC: #GMAIL is down. Life..spinning..out..of…control… Must g-talk w/ someone STAT!

Others predicted the end of the world:

theeKENye so gmail is not working, civilization is crumbling before us!!!!

Some were ironic (at least, I hope so, as this one came through thousands of tweets into the outage):

sarahk47 Hey y’all, is gmail down? No one seems to be tweeting about it.

Some unapologetically begged:

thecx RT: @codigoverde: Dear Gmail, I’m sorry about all the times I took you for granted, I love you and cherish you so please, come back. #gmail

There were some good ideas, too:

aaronpost College RULE in effect – If Gmail is down for 15minutes or more we all get to go home !!!

And some bad ones:

MikellKober The super speed at which I heard of Gmail problems will probably lead me to ask Twitter if/when I suspect I have cancer/surprise pregnancy

And a damn good question posed:

MrsRoadshow What’s your in-lieu-of-gmail plan? Alternate provider? Jus be glad for a bit of an email vacation? ESP? Other?

My back-up? The fetal position. But this is a good back-up, too:

NTChaddius @DaniAntol I’m pretending like it’s 1998. Gonna reactive AOL, make a hotmail address, and maybe listen to some Spice Girls #gmail #fail

Not even our friends across the pond were safe:

anoine j’obéit a gmail je réessaie toute les 30 secondes, çela fait 10minutes…
[I obeyed gmail I tried again every 30 seconds, for the last 10 minutes… Translation from French by myself.]

All-in-all, the Twitter feed kept me amused for a while as I did other things. Of course, as my “top priority” item at the time requires an e-mail before it can proceed (which I still haven’t gotten, since the outage prevented the questions I’m awaiting answers for going out until after business hours for my customer), I had to occupy my time with lower-priority things. Still awaiting the official word from Google on what actually happened, but at least service is restored.

Giant paste-bomb of some of my favorite tweets from the outage:

JulieLech Haha > RT @FamousDC: #GMAIL is down. Life..spinning..out..of…control… Must g-talk w/ someone STAT!

carliedt dear gmail, i realized just now that i’m not okay without you. love, carlie.

sarahk47 Hey y’all, is gmail down? No one seems to be tweeting about it.

tanya_n Top 5 things to do when Gmail is down http://bit.ly/ZvfAh <–I’m guilty of 3,as well as trying to sign into MSN,which is also not working!

fimoculous Gmail is down. Quick, everyone create a giant chat room over on Twitter!

Andrea1908 I thought something was wrong with Gmail & my first thought was to come to Twitter and confirm. So ludicrously speedy, that Twitter.

littlerandy now twitter will crash because of all the ‘gmail is down’ tweets! #sometimeswedoittoourselves

aaronpost College RULE in effect – If Gmail is down for 15minutes or more we all get to go home !!!

thecx RT: @codigoverde: Dear Gmail, I’m sorry about all the times I took you for granted, I love you and cherish you so please, come back. #gmail

mystykalkut Ca arrive une fois par an, mais c’est toujours quand t’as une piece jointe super importante a recuperer que Gmail… http://bit.ly/K9HdX
[It happens once a year, but it’s always when you have a super important attachment to get that Gmail does its little “Server Error” Translation from French by myself; note that I translated the full text from the bit.ly link.]

theeKENye so gmail is not working, civilization is crumbling before us!!!!

nickmccabe 🙁 RT @jennispinner 2000yrs ago we lived in tents and had to catch/kill our food. Now, we curl up into the fetal position when Gmail’s down.

anoine j’obéit a gmail je réessaie toute les 30 secondes, çela fait 10minutes…
[I obeyed gmail I tried again every 30 seconds, for the last 10 minutes… Translation from French by myself.]

Cathou29 c’est officiel gmail est down
[It’s official, Gmail is down Translation from French by myself.]

NTChaddius @DaniAntol I’m pretending like it’s 1998. Gonna reactive AOL, make a hotmail address, and maybe listen to some Spice Girls #gmail #fail

ibenjaminbarnes anybody else spazzing this bad? RT @thedecliner: try now… try now… try now… try now… try now… #gmail #chernobyl #apocalypse

Terminator3d I want my gmail back!

natehennings Just realized how much I depend on #Gmail ….they manage my work email too. #thumbstwiddling

MikellKober The super speed at which I heard of Gmail problems will probably lead me to ask Twitter if/when I suspect I have cancer/surprise pregnancy

MrsRoadshow What’s your in-lieu-of-gmail plan? Alternate provider? Jus be glad for a bit of an email vacation? ESP? Other?

piggyjinger Gmail go *boom*. 🙁

nicoduretour RT @RemyCharest: Nobody panic. Everything’s fine. It’s not like GMail is down or anything. Oh, wait.

Tusks_4ever Is anyone else’s Gmail account down?

jfb74 @GraemeF imap working fine from my iphone, but web site #fail #gmail

webatou comme je ne veux pas laisser tomber les copains… comment configurer Thunderbird avec Gmail Imap… http://tinyurl.com/llgnse
[Since I don’t want to lose touch(?) of friends… how to configure Thunderbird with Gmail IMAP… Translation from French by myself.]

noahbuchanan If that doesnt work I dont know what will. RT @SaraNeedham: Dear Gmail, I miss you. Please come home and I will bake you a cake. Love, Sara

ronga Tired of people talking about gmail. Can we talk about the markets, blackholes, philosophy, sports…anything else?

HentaiHotSpot I hope twitter doesn’t go down because gmail has gone down.