Many iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 users are enjoying the free Exchange sync service Google is providing. It is basically an Exchange layer for Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Sounds sweet right?
Think again,
Google Sync has been having a lot of technical problems lately. Just today, the service was complete offline for hours. The only thing Google said was they were having issues with a datacenter and no ETA on fixing the problem. see this support post here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=35f2df27a467e56c&hl=en
Now here is the double edged sword… Microsoft Exchange… or more accurately its implementation on these “smart” phones. When the service was down today… users (including myself) noticed that our contacts, calendar events, and emails were wiped out! Completely gone! I didn’t even know who was texting me anymore… because my iPhone could only show the caller ID.
Shouldn’t the iPhone be smart enough to say… “ok, the Google server is down…” or “what I’m about to do will wipe out 100% of the phone’s contacts… maybe I should ask the user before I do this…”
The server went dark… doesn’t mean the data on the phone needs to as well. Even if data on one end is wiped out… the user should be consulted in order to make an intelligent decision.
So guys… Google isn’t perfect… free services like Sync are even less perfect… However, if Google is serious about making Sync into a business oriented service they could at least be more transparent and responsible about technical issues. For example, adding Sync to the App status dashboard. http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en
Lastly, since Android and Blackberries have their own layer of protocol for sync, they were not affected by the Google Sync downtime today.
Update: as of Thursday, March 04. 10: 27 EST Google Sync is still not pushing emails through in a timely manner. It is working for some users as mentioned in the support forum, but most users are still experiencing delays.
Update x2: Thursday, March 04 11:30 EST Sync appears to be working, emails are being pushed with little to no delay. We’ll see how long it’ll last.
Upate x3: According to this post on Google Support. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=00d6bd3123867436&hl=en Another maintenance was performed for Sync and all issues have been resolved as of March 4th.
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Probably wouldn't of even known about this huge Google Sync issue happening today if I hadn't seen your tweets. Pretty hard to believe no one thought “hey, we should test out what happens if the Google sync service isn't available” before they released this thing. I also find it interesting that it basically only happened to iPhone users (not Android/BlackBerry) after all the arguing Apple & Google have been having lately (eg. Steve Jobs: “this don't-be-evil crap is bullsh*t!”)
I've been noticing that my push email via sync has been really slow as of late (last week or more).. to the point that it won't download new emails for my push account until I'm on wifi… I was pawning it off on my cell phone connection, but hopefully it has something to do with this and it can all be rectified once they get it down. I'm kind of happy I don't sync my contacts with it though… I don't reckon I'd feel too pleasant about losing everything, even if it was only temporary.
Sync appears to be back… but push email is experiencing long delays. At least all my contacts and calendar events are back.
This Sync downtime was very strange. The server m.google.com was still up… people could still login… but all its data were gone. That's why the iPhone synced up by wiping everything out. So I think Google should have just switched off the server altogether. That way the data on the phone could at least be intact during downtime.
@Mitchell there were so many ppl on the Google support forum linking the recently Android lawsuit to this massive downtime yesterday. lol
While it is true that Android and Blackberries don't use the ActiveSync protocol. However, that still doesn't explain why only Exchange users' data were wiped out.