A bug bit Gmail Monday and almost half of the webmail service’s users are experiencing email delivery delays and problems downloading attachments.
Google first acknowledged the problem shortly before 7:30 a.m. PDT and has been wrestling with it ever since, according to information on the Google Apps Status page.
In an update posted at around 2 p.m. PDT, the company disclosed that “less than 50 percent” of users had been impacted, which can safely be assumed to mean that at least 49 percent of users got hit.
Gmail has more than 425 million active users.
The Google Docs word-processing application and Presentation slide-creation application have also been experiencing a disruption during the same timeframe, but the company hasn’t disclosed the nature of that problem and the scope of users impacted.
In the latest update, posted at 1 p.m. PDT, Google said Gmail service had been restored "for most affected users" and that it expects to have the problem solved for everyone affected by 4 p.m. PDT. That's three hours longer than the previous resolution estimate.
"We expect a small and declining number of messages to still be affected for the next 3 hours as the remaining delivery backlog is cleared. We are working on several options to accelerate the process and will provide more information when we have an updated time estimate," the note reads.
The Google Docs word processing application and Presentation slide creation application also had a service disruption that started about 7:30 a.m. PDT and lasted until 1 p.m. PDT. The company hasn't disclosed the nature of the problem that affected those cloud applications nor the scope of affected users.
The duration of the outage and the number of people affected make this incident a very significant one for Google, which is involved in a brutal fight with Microsoft in the market for enterprise cloud email and collaboration apps.
Monday's outage is affecting not only individuals who use Gmail for free but also businesses, schools, and government agencies that use it as part of the fee-based Google Apps suite, as evidenced by multiple Twitter posts and discussion forum threads.
Google Apps competes directly with Microsoft's Office 365, and the two rivals are constantly trumpeting customer wins and sniping at each other's product suites.
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter beyond what's been posted on the Apps Status site.
Updated 9/23/2013 at 2:20 p.m. PDT
Juan Carlos Perez covers e-commerce, Google, web-application development, and cloud applications for the IDG News Service. More by Juan Carlos Perez
Sometimes, you can’t help but pay attention to what the man behind the curtain is doing. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Nokia’s device and services business for more than $7 billion, effectively seizing control of the entire Windows Phone experience, from software to hardware to services.
Just like that, the companies behind every major smartphone operating system now compete directly with their manufacturing partners. And while Google erected a "firewall" between Android and Motorola when it bought the handset maker in 2012, Microsoft has no plans to separate Nokia from the core Windows Phone business. It’s full steam ahead for Microsoft-made smartphones as Redmond tries to single-handedly turn Windows Phone from an also-ran into a contender.
IDG News Service - Verizon and Vodafone are close to a deal that will see the U.S.-based carrier buy out the U.K. company's stake in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion, according to press reports.
Vodafone last week confirmed negotiations for the buy-out of its 45-percent stake, a deal that is not seen as having much impact on Verizon Wireless customers.
Negotiators for both companies have agreed on terms of a cash and stock transaction, but both boards must still approve the deal, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The expectation that interest rates could rise may be driving Verizon to close on the buy-out, which it has been seeking for some time, analysts said last week. Higher interest rates would drive up the cost of financing the deal.
Vodafone is expected to use proceeds of the buyout to shore up its European business.
"What is finally motivating Vodafone is the implementation of their European integrated carrier strategy," Chetan Sharma, founder and president of Chetan Sharma Consulting, told IDG News last week.
Stephen Lawson, of the IDG News Service, contributed to this report.
Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.
n its earliest days and versions, opening a whole bunch of apps in a row on an Android device would leave many of them in that device's memory, causing your short attention span to gum up the works.
Memory usage improved, though, and popular "task killers" became an unnecessary utility. Then, in Android 4.0, there appeared a list of recent applications, which seemed meant for easy app-switching. And yet: you could swipe apps away. What did that do? Well, it seemed to "close" them, because they'd load up fresh, from their launch screen, the next time you tapped on them. But then again, if it was something like an email app, or Twitter, you'd keep getting notifications. So what does "swiping" do, exactly?
As is often the case: ask an experienced developer, one who can write in Plain English. Dianne Hackborn works on Android at Google, and uses Google+ to spark a number of discussions on the platform and its intricacies. Here's what Dianne says about "swiping" an app, per a Android StackExchange discussion, via a Lifehacker post on that topic:
Actually, removing an entry in recent tasks will kill any background processes that exist for the process. It won't directly causes services to stop, however there is an API for them to find out the task was removed to decide if they want this to mean they should stop. This is so that removing say the recent task of an e-mail app won't cause it to stop checking for e-mail.
So if, say, Facebook is being wonky at uploading a picture and you want it to stop trying, you can swipe it out of the recent apps list and it will stop that action. It's the same as if you went into Facebook and tapped the "Back" button until everything went away. But Facebook will still be able to ping you about messages, event invitations, and all those things that people are doing with their lives that are so much more fulfilling than whatever it is you are doing at that moment.
So what if you want to actually triple-kill-and-bury an app, one you believe is sucking up battery life or killing your data connection or just generally being bad? Do this, Hackborn writes:
... (L)ong press on recent tasks to go to app info, and hit force stop there. For stop is a complete kill of the app -- all processes are killed, all services stopped, all notifications removed, all alarms removed, etc. The app is not allowed to launch again until explicitly requested.
Sometimes the Android answers are just falling from the sky. Into StackExchange.
