What went wrong in Gmail’s epic Fail & how to avoid time loss?

Google is certain going through a lean patch in the year 2009. In January we saw Google Search bot marking all sites as harmful to visit for almost two hours worldwide. Yesterday it was Gmail’s turn turn for an outage.

Gmail team has given an explanation which may not be accepted by people whose working hours were disrupted by it:

This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

How to avoid your time loss because of this outage:

While this explanation may suffice those who don’t run their businesses on Gmail. But those who do should now be more careful and use these steps to avoid time wastage:

1.) Go to Gmail Settings page

2.)Activate Gmail forwarding option and add another email from a different client (like yahoo, MSN or AOL)

This will ensure that if Gmail fails you can work with others(like MSN, Yahoo etc.) with ease

Related posts:

1. What actually went wrong in Google Search Epic Fail?
2. Google apologises for Gmail Outage today
3. How to import all emails & contacts from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL to Gmail
4. How to manage multiple email accounts within Gmail?
5. Gmail Labs: Convert your Gmail into Google Document

Tags: Gmail, google, how to