Gmail's bounced back from its recent multihour outage, but questions over what went wrong are thus far unanswered. The Google mail service was offline from about 4:30 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. ET (or from 9:30 a.m. till noon for nations on Greenwich Mean Time). Google says it is now "investigating the root cause" of the issue.
Gmail Outages Over Time
While "frequent" would probably be an exaggeration when it comes to describing Gmail outages, "unusual" might be missing the mark by a hair, too. In the past six months, Gmail has suffered some form of downtime on five separate occasions before this week's incident:
• July 16, 2008: A similar "502 error" struck Gmail, leading to what was described as a "long outage" by affected users.
• August 6, 2008: Technical trouble knocked an "undetermined number" of Gmail users (including both regular users and paying Google Apps clients) out of their mail for about 15 hours.
• August 11, 2008: An issue with Google's "contacts system" caused Gmail access to go offline for a "couple of hours" for numerous users. Both individual accounts and Google Apps accounts were affected again.
• August 15, 2008: The third outage within a span of two weeks left users locked out of their accounts for more than 24 hours. That pesky "502 server error" popped up on the Gmail login page here, too.
• October 16, 2008: Users went a full 30 hours without access. Google didn't elaborate on what caused the issue.
So, my final thought: Gmail was down. But outages occur anywhere you go, and worse things could happen and 's be honest with each other here.
The beautiful cast of Watchmen lit up London late Monday, strutting their highly anticipated selves up and down the red actually yellow carpet at the film's big premiere.
The yellow carpet launch of the $120 million comic book adaptation comes with the hopes it can repeat the sucess of other recent superhero hits, like 'The Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man'.
Megan Fox Transformers star and Brian Austin Green have quietly ended their engagement. The decision was mutual according to source “They were still friends”.
Fox and Green met in 2004 and last 2 years ago in November 2006 they were engaged.
Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won eight, the most for any film that year, including Best Picture. It also won five Critics' Choice Awards, four Golden Globes, and seven BAFTA Awards, including Best Film. The film is also the subject of controversy concerning its portrayal of India and Hinduism as well as the welfare of its child actors.
Bruce E. Ivins, 62, scientist, who worked at the government's biodefense labs at
A San Francisco start-up is launching the first mobile video ads for the iPhone on Wednesday.
Ad Infuse is serving up ads from Esurance and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America on several sites, including Health & Fitness Mobile for Men and MondoMedia.com.
I visited the HFM mobile site (hfm2go.com) on my brand-new iPhone and clicked on one of its portable training programs. I waited four or five minutes while the ad downloaded and then a blank, white screen came on, making me wonder what to do next. The ad finally started playing, and I was able to watch the 10- or 12-second anti-drug spot before the training video for working out abs on an exercise ball started playing.
Wow, if that's the experience, I think I'll pass.
The problem was probably a slow connection over AT&T's network, but even Ad Infuse Chief Executive Brian Cowley acknowledged that the mobile Web application market is so nascent that the experience in some ways will be closer to dial-up than broadband.
I know publishers have to monetize their content, but maybe they should wait until the mobile infrastructure can handle it better.
Life & Style magazine reports that Christina Aguilera’s baby has been born.
The magazine talked to Jim H. Fogel, a friend of Aguilera’s father-in-law. “He’s so thrilled to be a grandfather again,” Fogel said.
This is the first baby for Aguilera and husband Jordan Bratman. The magazine did not report the gender of the baby.
source: MSNBC
Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand beekeeper-turned-mountaineer who with his Sherpa guide in 1953 became the first known men to conquer Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, died early today at Auckland City Hospital.
He was 88. No cause of death was reported.
Hillary's 29,035-foot climb up the Himalayan mountain was done amid subzero temperatures, unpredictable winds and daunting crevasses, and with a grade of equipment now considered primitive. The ascent ended a decades-long quest undertaken by countless to test human endurance.
On May 29, 1953, the successful ascent and return by Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in a team led by British army Col. John Hunt made them instant international celebrities.
[ more stories...]
Report by: Adam Bernstein
Former “Lost” star Michelle Rodriguez has found her way out of jail.
Rodriguez was released from a Los Angeles County women’s jail in Lynwood on Wednesday after serving 18 days of a 180-day sentence for violating probation in a drunken driving case, authorities said.
She was released early under a program that deals with jail overcrowding by allowing nonviolent female inmates to serve as little as 10 percent of their sentence.
For more details of the news, see this link.