Google Calendar is down | Hacker News Reader

Google Calendar is down

calendar.google.com

156 pointsnormanjoyner78 comments

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My smart dishwasher is throwing an IOException!

CHANGELOG

* V2.0.5 - Dishwasher is now only compatible with Cleanly.io brand detergent

* V4.1.2 - Dishwasher now only accepts Cleanly.io branded and DRM'd plates and silverware.

* V5.6.2 - Cleanly.io plates and silverware are now single-use only

* V6.0.4 - Dishwasher now only works with Cleanly.io Pure Life water. Please contact your local water supplier for pricing and contracting.

Don't forget that Cleanly.io is shutting down, so now your dishwasher won't run at all anymore.

Also don't forget the fresh water pipes in your home are owned by Cleanly.io and leased to you, meaning you can no longer receive water until some other company acquires the remnants of Cleanly.io during their decade long bankruptcy proceedings.

The sad thing this, that is not even really satire - ISPs own the fiber in office and multi-resident buildings all the time, and their use is only available to others by lease contracts.

Silicon Valley, where people compare the necessity of Internet to that of water.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/02/08/the-internet-is-a-g...

Announcement details at http://cleanly.io/blog/our-incredible-journey

Screenshot at http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/296708555778/cle...

Not far away from printers, which may refuse to print on an unauthorized cartridge.

My printer refused to print on an authorized cartridge the other day. I say print but what I really mean is jam.

also Keurig machines

* V8.0.1 - Dishwasher can now program itself based on events in Google Calendar.

IoST strikes again! https://twitter.com/internetofshit

Pardon me, but out of curiosity, were you joking or serious? (I found your comment hilarious, and while I have never seen a smart dishwasher, I can't rule it out, hence why I'm asking.)

He wasn't joking, his dish washer is a local Stanford graduate student trying to make some extra money.

I think we need a new set of HTTP status codes similar to HTTP 418 "I'm a dishwasher".

I wonder:

What is the average downtime of Google Mail / calendar vs the average large corporation's exchange server?

Another thought- when Google calendar / mail goes down - it's likely business users blame Google - not the IT group. When a self-hosted exchange server goes down, IT is probably blamed. Leaving an incentive to move toward cloud providers just to shift the blame.

The last time Gmail suffered a total and global outage, it resulted in no email lost and delays of at the most 4 hours.

That basically made their outage an argument to switch to them.

This is, IME, why big shops try to push outsourcing as much as they can. Whether development or structure, passing the buck to someone else is politically better.

If you or your provider succeeds, you both can claim victory.

If you try to upgrade/restructure and fail, everyone blames you. If your provider tries to upgrade/restructure and fails, you can blame them, and everyone in your company agrees with you. So politically, you can save yourself from "losing".

There are cloud based providers of Exchange that have more or less downtime than Exchange, or any email provider. I had hosted my own email servers for over 15 years because it was the normal thing to do when I started.

I don't remember the last time email has gone down for me, but calendar pain hurts me more.

On google now, and today's outage makes me realize it might be simpler to just install Zimbra and mirror it across two Amazon locations for another 10 years. I'm not a fan of email providers online because hotmail lost/deleted 15 years of my emails.

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. Users of Google Calendar see 'Server Error' page intermittently."

from: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=84...

I find this quite interesting. Have been using Google calendar for about 10 years now, and never experienced downtime before.

Been using just as long, and while Google calendar and other Google services have been down before, it's true, it's a very rare occurrence to affect this many users.

General amnesty for missed meetings today.

I got lucky I happened to glance at the clock 3 minutes before my call :)

Fortunately Google Calendar syncs with the app, so as long as the app already retrieved your appointments you should be just fine. Same reason why it works even without an internet connection.

If you had your Calendar open in a web page it will continue to be readable. I have a pinned tab that I can still see everything 3 months in either direction.

I dont know what to do with my hands right now

All my meetings are on the calendar. I dont know what to do with my life right now

Google Calendar for Android appears to be working.

good work today folks! see you tomorrow.

https://xkcd.com/1024/

No meetings today - wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot!

English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portugese, Chinese (zh-Hant), Chinese (zh), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Korean, Russain, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish.

It's fun to ponder why they picked that order and why other popular languages didn't make the cut.

Likely their top internationalized user bases.

Yeah that's how we do it. Group customer by language, sort by count.

You'd probably be hard-pressed to find a gmail user that doesn't speak at least one of those languages.

From http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html

  "Monthly Uptime Percentage" means total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime suffered in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.

Looks like they forgot to multiply it by 100 (at least in the definition).

You can represent percentages as a fraction. No need to multiply by 100.

99/100 = 0.99 = 99%

Google calendar went down after my robot went to sleep. Even though WiFi (and Google Fibre) is working fine, due to the calendar outage the robot can't receive instructions to get up and continue with work.

Who is going to compensate? Google?

> Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot.

I wonder if they're getting attacked.

I get this error page pretty frequently from my office -- but its possible they turned down the threshold in case of an attack.

I got this one for the first time today as well, minutes before the site went down.

Same.

I'm getting this all the time, from 3 different accounts. My IP is from Brazil; I wonder if there's any geo relation...

One of the reasons I use FastMail (https://fastmail.com) for email and calendar rather than Google is that when outages happen, the explain what is going on (http://www.fastmailstatus.com). Outages are inevitable, so having (a) information and (b) the ability to contact a human are valuable features IMO.

They also just pushed out the invitation detecting thing that Google has had for quite a while that lets you add stuff to your calendar quickly. Sadly I still use Google's calendar despite having Fastmail because it's just a lot better.

Google has explained what is going on:

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=84...

'Explained' may be a bit of an overstatement for that page. 'Acknowledged and provided timestamps' is more like it.

EDIT: Although it does look like they will update it with more information soon.

Interesting that the status page marks this as a 'service disruption' versus 'service outage'. The page doesn't have any definitions of these terms anyway, so it's hard to know what the difference is.

I was completely unable to access the service. It seems like a 'service outage' to me!

The difference might be that outage is down for all, disruption might be down for 50%.

You are probably looking for http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847...

That doesn't _explain_ anything. Compare the level of detail to http://www.fastmailstatus.com.

I regularly contact humans at Google for support for my clients. Telephone rings, human operator picks up ... of course my clients are paying for their Google services, so if you're relying on the free version this doesn't (and shouldn't) apply.

Shouldn't?!

It seems to be down now? http://www.fastmailstatus.com/

So, Google fails so rarely that you just sold me on the idea of not changing! :)

I had a notification in my Google Calendar to cancel my Google Music trial. Luckily, Google Calendar went down, after i saw it :)

Thankfully my phone caches my calendars. While it's unavailable in a browser, I do see all my events on my phone. Yay!

> my phone caches my calendars

The word you're looking for is "synchronizes". This has existed for decades, now.

Let's pray for a material design update !

Google reporting "service disruption" for calendar: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

direct link to incident:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847...

Aaaaand, it's back.

This is your regular reminder that it is dangerous that Google has a near monopoly providing free services like calendars and email.

I sync my Google calendar to my devices, so if it goes belly up, I can open a new account somewhere else and start using that with little issue.

I do think it's a bad idea to rely 100% on something business critical hosted by someone else, without having your own backup somewhere. Hosted services go down eventually. That doesn't mean we can't use them, just be aware of their limitations.

Who knows if they actually hide tax data in the calendar. No-one [0] would suspect that. Bring down the service to dodge the taxman.

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-probe-spain-idUSKCN...

Calendar and Hangouts https://twitter.com/GoogleforWork/status/748516307235143681

That tweet does not say hangouts?

Offline since 6:10am PDT according to our logs.

Google Calendar became self-aware today at 6:10am. The singularity is upon us.

...and it immediately shut down? Thats kind of depressing.

Perhaps it's a benevolent overlord, and it decided that cancelling all our meetings is the best way to make the world a better place.

Back up for me on multiple accounts.

Seems to be back up now.

It must be due to the Spanish Inquisition today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007940

After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I did - it was in my Outlook calendar

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY

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