Yesterday, the internet experienced a moment of apocalypse angst when Gmail users around the world (including C2) experienced a variety of issues getting email. Lasting roughly 40 minutes, users experienced complete outages, slowness and, if they were using Chrome with browser syncing enabled, outright application crashes. It turns out, rather than being able to blame ancient prophecies, Google fingered one of their own as the root source of the problem.

What this means for you:

Cloud nay-sayers may have had a brief moment in the sun while Gmail was on the ropes, but the fact remains that it’s still a very reliable service. Several lessons may be learned from the experience, all of them common sense:

• If your critical business practices rely on a free email service being available all the time, everywhere, you may want to re-evaluate those practices.
• When making adjustments to your business infrastructure, always double-check your work, and make sure you have a backup of your data.
• When technology fails, 9 times out of 10, a human is behind the failure.