I don’t know who needs to hear this (probably anyone relying on G Suite for their business email), but for myself and some untold number of additional paying customers, Gmail mail delivery was completely non-functional for five straight days last week. That’s right, folks — an uptime of 28.57%!
Google acknowledged fault early on in the outage, then memory-holed that acknowledgement, and is now refusing to update the G Suite status dashboard, or discuss the dashboard’s break with reality.
Here are the receipts of this Kafkaesque nightmare:
[Wednesday, Aug 12] Set up G Suite. Notice that emails are not delivered and sporadically result in a generic “An error occurred. Your message was not sent.” reply from the mailer daemon. Attempt to contact support via chat. Give up after waiting 2 hours for a response
[Thursday, Aug 13] Email delivery is still totally non-functional. Support still unresponsive. Receive an unsolicited, contradictory email stating that both “The issue with Gmail is believed to be affecting a very small number of customers and our Engineering Team is working on it.” and “you may have been affected by an issue that has already been resolved”. The G Suite console shows this:
[Friday, Aug 14] “The issue should have been fixed for all affected users” (read: it wasn’t)
[Saturday, Aug 15] “Workaround: None at this time” (fact check: true)
[Sunday, Aug 16] “Our Gmail engineering team is aware of the issue and currently working on a fix to resolve this issue for all affected users as soon as possible”
[Monday, Aug 17] “Product engineering has made the necessary changes to enable the vast majority of affected customers to send with Gmail”
