Cloud computing is the looming buzz word. All these magical “apps in the cloud” sound exciting… until the cloud fizzles on you.
In June, we switched our email service over to the Google Enterprise version for Education, and until this morning at 11:04am PDT I was a happy camper. My IMAP email connection was failing to connect from the desktop. When I went to the web version I got a 502 server error. I then IM-ed the office in Austin to see if they were able to access email. Everyone there is okay. I tried another computer. I rebooted. I thought of prayer, but stopped short.
Then I called the customer support number (11:30am) and spoke to someone who confirmed there were some intermittent outages, and I was assured their engineers were working on it. No problem, not having email for a short while was nice. Just for grins and a multipronged approach, I submitted a report via their web form (using my cogdogblog gmail address as a return), and got this response at 11:41am:
I understand that several users at your domain at experiencing 502 errors.
Typically, these errors are temporary, however, it appears for a small subset of our users this issue has persisted for longer. We’ve escalated this to our engineers with the highest priority and they are working diligently to resolve this problem.
That me now in the small subset club. But look! Those clever Google genius engineers have me as thei highest priority! They are working diligently!