Gmail Down Will Twitter Be Next

By now I'm sure you all know that Gmail has experienced a major outage, information that has been confirmed by Google’s Apps Status Dashboard, but what you might not know is that the added strain of the outage and the sheer volume of Tweets about it might led to a major interruption of services over at Twitter.

Via Google Apps Dashboard: 1:02 PM
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 2:16:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.
Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.

TechCrunch's MG Siegler reports, " When I first noticed it being down [gmail], I did a Twitter search and just minutes later there were over 10,000 new results. A couple minutes later, there were over 20,000."

For now it looks like Twitter is standing strong, with no fail-whale insight so Tweeters might be safe, at least for the time being. The only issues I've seen on our account today is a lack of a trending topics list, however it looks like everything else is working properly. Often times when there is a major interruption of service somewhere else on the web sites like Facebook and Twitter are adversely affected by a sudden large influx of traffic. The sudden rush of hits creates an overburden on serves which become strained and often times fail.

Doing a quick search for Gmail currently shows a glimmer of hope with many users reporting Gmail is back in service. Checking my personal email I can confirm it appears as though Gmail is back up and working again, at least for me. But looking at the Google Apps Status page it might be temporary as it was just updated with the following information:

2:13 PM

We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 3:13:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.

Also, at this time, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (applies only to Google Apps Premier and Edu customers) is not available.