On August 20, 2020 Gmail, Google Drive and Meet, and other online services appeared to have stopped working for millions of users. Google has not been forthcoming with the reason, according to The Independent. The technology giant said that it was aware its users were having problems and was working to understand the cause of the outage. The company also emphasized that the issue was not worldwide, with not all of the services being entirely broken.
In addition to Drive and Gmail, several other Google services such as Meet, Chat, Docs, Groups, Sites, Slides, Voice, and Keep were all experiencing glitches, with users either unable to access or unable to carry out everyday tasks such as download slides.
According to Ed Macnair, CEO of Censornet: “Particularly in the light of recent events, tools such as GMail, Slack and Meet have become even more crucial for organisations to communicate and collaborate effectively. When these remote working tools fail, productivity often grinds to a halt which can cause a direct financial cost to the business.”
Continuing his commentary for Digital Journal, Macnair says: “The key component to protect productivity is keeping email accessible. It is the lifeblood of many businesses, so providing users with an emergency inbox, isolated from the main infrastructure, can be a vital lifeline.”
With further measures, the analyst recommends: “Beyond this, email archiving should be implemented too. Whilst the emergency inbox typically stores 30 days’ history of inbox and sent items, an email archive provides access to all historic email – with the ability to quickly search for messages.”
Macnair also stresses: “A tamper-proof archive will also provide redundancy should the organisation need to meet compliance demands, which is critical to companies in sectors such as finance, healthcare and legal. In the unplannable event that these tools go down, having a fall back will protect against the unexpected and mitigate the wider impact on the business as a whole.”
