With Gmail Down, Users Turn to Twitter for Info

I continue to marvel at the immediacy of information on Twitter.

I seldom use my personal Gmail account during the day, but at the moment I’m in the midst of transitioning between computers.  Email is already on the new one, but my calendar is on the old one.  So I sent some info to my Gmail account to cut and paste into my calendar.  When I couldn’t get the email to open, I turned to Twitter.

A quick search on gmail told me (a) I wasn’t alone; (b) where to go to track the outage (http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en) and (c) that thousands of people rely on Gmail.  I’ve tracked a lot of breaking news on Twitter, and I’ve never seen comments pour in this fast.  When you do a search, the search page will periodically note “xxx new results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.”  Just now I managed to count “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand …” and no further before this popped up:

Remember the dark ages, oh … a year or two ago?  When you would have to find a friend who also uses Gmail, ask them to log into their account to see if they had the same problem, etc.?  Those who resist Twitter haven’t yet learned the value of real-time info, especially for Customer Service issues.

My big question in all this isn’t “when will my Gmail be back?”  It’s “why isn’t @google posting updates?  Ah … just checked again.  They’re finally joining the conversation:

Afterword: Google explains and apologizes here.