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posted by n1 on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the bad-for-business dept.

Yep, it’s not just you: Google Calendar appears to be down and has been since [Thursday, June 30 at] 9:47AM ET, according to Google’s App Status Dashboard.

Try going to Google Calendar now and you’ll likely be greeted with a blank page, or a server error page that tells you in a handful of languages that your meetings today are screwed and you should just go outside and escape this internet world.

[...] Update 2: As of 2:36PM ET, Google says the service should be back fully. Carry on!

Source: The Next Web

The issues were spilling over to Hangouts, where some users were having issues joining conference calls through Calendar invites.

It's unclear how widespread this outage was, but from the complaints on Twitter, it was affecting users worldwide.

Source: Mashable


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  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:53AM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:53AM (#368731)

    Who would have thunk? An online service going down for a while? Sooo surprising.

    Oh, right the damn kids all think this shit is supposed to be perfect somehow all in teh cloudz and stuff.

    If an online service goes down, you just sit back and wait for it to come back up. Unless you were retarded enough to put it to use for something critical with no fallback.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:19AM (#368758)

      Hah, you should meet some of my clients. I'm actually surprised I didn't have to handle any OMG sky is falling emergencies for this outage. I'll never understand it. $major_service goes down. Blame the call center!

      These people aren't kids, either. They're middle aged Americans. And when something drops off the internet, OMG sky falling!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:28AM (#368743)

    It's disappointing that Google screwed up. Honest, boss, SN has the story.

  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:34AM

    by Gravis (4596) on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:34AM (#368745)

    the cloud: liable to have rainy days... and result in sudden data homelessness. ((ヾ(≧皿≦;)ノ))

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Saturday July 02 2016, @04:14AM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 02 2016, @04:14AM (#368769)
      Umm... okay. In the last five years I've suffered less outage-time from Google, Dropbox, Netflix, and iTunes combined than I have from the power company. My ISP, though not as bad as the power, was still worse than any of those services. I've had far better reliability from cloud services than I could possibly have by rolling my own.
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
  • (Score: 2) by bziman on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:38AM

    by bziman (3577) on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:38AM (#368746)

    Thursday is my heavy meeting day, and I'm interacting with Calendar all day and didn't notice any issues. Perhaps it only affected a portion of users? On the other hand, that's why I host my own calendar and e-mail for my personal stuff. I'm not subject to the whim of anyone else, and when it breaks, it's my own fault.

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:47AM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:47AM (#368749) Homepage

      All Good Things must come to an End.

      Google is constantly tweeking their algorithms, and you can bet your Black ass cost-cutting(or threat of international scandal, or some other threat to Google) had something to do with it.

      This should not surprise all who work in the tech industry.

      I've found that the Google search algos have gone from accurate to near-bullshit.

      Looks like they're hiring and training those people you agreed should know Computer Science.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @05:22AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @05:22AM (#368783)

        we are starting a company that meta-mines google search results.
        we have 1024 gmail accounts.
        each account has predetermined "personality".
        example, one "person" is blond and likes music and arts.
        another "person" is tech orientated,
        etc.
        in short the 1024 gmail accounts roughly translate to a department like you would find at a big university.

        when then do unfiltered, plain, full javascript and tracking enabled searches thru these "personality" bots
        and mine the data...
        being logged in to a google service during google searches seems to "unlock" the old usable search results.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:20AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:20AM (#368759)

      I didn't notice either, but I assume that the local copies that I already had worked fine. Outages like this are a great reminder about why "the cloud" is not a great solution in all cases.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by boltronics on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:06AM

    by boltronics (580) on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:06AM (#368756) Homepage Journal

    I've been trying to deal with Google at my workplace. We have employees in a Google Group (which we use as a regular mail list), and people from an outside organisation share calendar entries with our group. Problem is, some employees don't get anything shared with them.

    Turns out, since our Google Apps account is so old, there were a bunch of @gtempaccount.com addresses (which some people don't know about, don't have credentials for and can't access). Google Calendar is actually sharing calendars with those @gtempaccount.com addresses instead of the actual accounts on the mail list, for no apparent reason!

    Apparently there is no guarantee that our company is associated with the @gtempaccount.com addresses, as Google won't let us reset those passwords so we can close down those accounts. This seems to mean that effectively, if you share calendar entries with a Google Group to an outside organisation (or maybe an internal one too.. not sure), you're potentially exposing data to unknown third parties. Further, it means that there is no guarantee the people on the list will even see what you are sharing.

    Google claimed to me in an e-mail that this whole screw-up is due to a 3rd party middle-ware component they use, and there's nothing they can do to fix it! I've spent many hours troubleshooting this, and dealing with their support people has been very unpleasant to say the least! So in short, don't use Google Apps - especially for your workplace. Not that you should be using SaaS anyway.

    --
    It's GNU/Linux dammit!
    • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:50PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:50PM (#368876) Journal

      So in short, don't use Google Apps - especially for your workplace.

      Amen to that! I'll never use Google Apps or code for anything ever. Here's a previous post of mine regarding the nightmare of trying to convert from the defunct Google Calendar ClientLogin to anything similar in functionality using their Godless OAuth2 API:

      https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=12908&cid=325848 [soylentnews.org]

      As mentioned there, it was actually worse than that, but almost too painful to remember. Never ever again.

      • (Score: 2) by boltronics on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:09PM

        by boltronics (580) on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:09PM (#368880) Homepage Journal

        Been there, when I wrote a command line tool in Python to manage Google Groups (just adding/removing/listing group users) so I didn't have to deal with the painfully slow web admin interface. Got something working nice enough, only for Google to completely break the API some months later.

        Waste of time, not doing that again. I wasn't writing a massive app I was going to resell or something, but just wanted my workflow to be more efficient.

        --
        It's GNU/Linux dammit!
        • (Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:40PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Saturday July 02 2016, @03:40PM (#368912) Journal

          Got something working nice enough, only for Google to completely break the API some months later.

          I really is remarkable. The whole point of an API is supply a documented interface that doesn't change, even if the internals of what it's querying does. My companies product has an API...most of which I wrote. I design that stuff carefully because it's a golden rule that we never change documented functionality once it gets out there...period. Google seems to think they're too important for that I guess.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @04:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @04:08AM (#368768)

    I'd like to report that my Zimbra instance at home was just fine Thursday and has been everyday since I stood it up about 4 years ago.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @06:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @06:14AM (#368789)

    Or did no one try to log on to Google+ that day?

  • (Score: 2) by goody on Sunday July 03 2016, @01:54AM

    by goody (2135) on Sunday July 03 2016, @01:54AM (#369033)

    Six people notice. Details at 11.