Gmail Goes Offline Again, Boosts YouTube Popularity
Popular video sharing site YouTube, which is currently blocking UK users from accessing premium music videos, seems to be the second most visited Google owned domain, thus surpassing Gmail – at least in the US. According to a report from Hitwise, the most popular Google owned domains are, from top to bottom: Google.com, YouTube.com, and mail.google.com.
“For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since,” says Hitwise.
To my mind, this is not exactly too surprising if you consider the fact that Gmail has been experiencing some problems lately. Late last month, following the news that Google Gears powered Gmail will work offline, the site actually went offline – as in full-blown outage. Now for a second time, Gmail is once again offline, affecting an undetermined number of users in Asia and Europe.
According to a Google spokesperson, the mail client was down for “a small subset of users” for about half an hour before being restored. Some users may still not be able to access their Gmail account and for that reason the Gmail team is working hard to fix the problem and get the email service up and running as fast as possible. Still, affected users can expect to wait for about 24 to 36 hours until all the kinks are worked out.
Just as the recent Google Docs privacy breach , when the Mountain View search engine giant said only 0.0.5% of users were affected, I can’t but wonder about what “a small subset of users” actually means. From a Google point of view, small might actually be quite a lot, if you consider how many people rely on Gmail to get their email messages.
“For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since,” says Hitwise.
To my mind, this is not exactly too surprising if you consider the fact that Gmail has been experiencing some problems lately. Late last month, following the news that Google Gears powered Gmail will work offline, the site actually went offline – as in full-blown outage. Now for a second time, Gmail is once again offline, affecting an undetermined number of users in Asia and Europe.
According to a Google spokesperson, the mail client was down for “a small subset of users” for about half an hour before being restored. Some users may still not be able to access their Gmail account and for that reason the Gmail team is working hard to fix the problem and get the email service up and running as fast as possible. Still, affected users can expect to wait for about 24 to 36 hours until all the kinks are worked out.
Just as the recent Google Docs privacy breach , when the Mountain View search engine giant said only 0.0.5% of users were affected, I can’t but wonder about what “a small subset of users” actually means. From a Google point of view, small might actually be quite a lot, if you consider how many people rely on Gmail to get their email messages.
