On September 1st, gmail was down for about 100 minutes. This is not the first time that gmail suffered from a failure and probably not the last one neither...

The interesting point about this failure is not the technical explanation, but the media coverage of such a failure. In Belgium, the failure was mentioned, almost in realtime during the failure, on the RTBF radio, but also in several newspapers. During the news at 11.00pm, the journalist explained that this problem was probably affecting many people and that the duration of the outage was unknown.

Although the Internet was designed as a distributed system, more and more people are using it as a centralised system... A few years ago, Internet users typed URLs in Netscape to go from one web server to another. Then, they moved to yahoo to explore the web from a single portal. Nowadays, it seems that nobody is able to remember URLs anymore and that they always start from the google search page. I recently saw someone in our department who used google to find the URL of our university... It seems that more and more people are moving their mail to gmail. This can be convenient as long as gmail is up, although by doing this, users also give lots of information to google datamining's algorithm about themselves... However, the drawback of everyone moving to gmail is that when gmail fails, everyone is affected.

In the long term, given the growing reliance of our society on web-based services, we should probably consider to require providers of large scale web-based services such as search engines, chat systems, email, ... to publically disclose all their outages once they affect a sufficiently large number of users. Google discloses publically the problems that affect its services based on its own measurements, but not all popular services are as open. Such public disclosures are already mandatory in the USA for telecommunication services, see http://www.fcc.gov/pshs/services/cip/nors/nors.html