So Gmail was down for about 100 minutes last week.  Did anyone notice?ADHERER

Of course people noticed.  Some acted like it was the end of the world.  But the POP3 and IMAP services were still up (I surmise those run on different server farms), and, I surmise, SMTP.  It was only the web front-end that was down.

Apparently it was a cascade effect.  A handful of servers were taken down for maintenance or upgrade or some such.  That traffic was shunted to another group of servers, which got overloaded, shut down, and sent the traffic to the next group of servers, and the thing just snowballed.

It’s kind of a shame, but these things happen.  And I guess it’s a good wake-up call for Google to beef up their systems a tad.  But all in all, I can’t fault Google in the least.  They’ve still given us the best email experience bar none, and all for free.

But it does underscore the need for having either an email client set up to use Gmail’s POP3 or IMAP services.  Or at least get a backup Yahoo! account.

Since I do my primary emailing on my iPhone, that 100 minutes passed by completely unnoticed.  I also have at least one Mail.app client set up for Gmail.

So let me know how you handled the outage?  Were you oblivious, like I was?  Or were you fetal in a corner sucking your thumb whimpering about how God has forsaken you?  Let me know in the comments below.