All your Gmail is down, down, down

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 03:13

IT Industry - Market

Microsoft Office 365

For all its so-called sophistication and technical nous, Google appears to have been brought to its knees by the oldest trick in the book - a distributed denial of service attack that made Gmail inaccessible to an estimated 110 million users on Tuesday.

The attack appears to have been carried out using thousands of PCs under the control of miscreants to try and access the service simultaneously. Around 7.30 last night AEST the service crashed, reports say.

The outage may not be unrelated to recent phishing attempts aimed at stealing Gmail account data.

Though Google, in typical style, did not reveal the actual cause of the outage, the fact that people who sign in now are being asked to enter text from a captcha to authenticate indicates that an automated attack was the reason for the outage.

A captcha lists a small fragment of text that a user enters after providing a username and password; this ensures that it is a human who is logging in.

There were three Gmail outages in 2008 (1; 2; 3) the company also suffered acute embarrassment earlier this year when a silly mistake by one of its tech staff led to all sites thrown up by a search query shown as harmful to users .

This error also resulted in some legitimate mail being sent into spam folders on Gmail accounts.

Google's so-called "news" service has been a further cause of egg on the company's face in the past - bogus news, like this has been published and a company's stock price has been put at serious risk by occurrences like this.

Is it time for those who are able to do so to consider setting up their own webmail service, using a free alternative like SquirrelMail or Open Webmail on a bog standard Linux box, rather than depend on a service like Gmail? One thing for sure: there'll be no snooping and ads won't keep appearing as you try to read your email.

What do you think, gentle reader?