AlanBarber.Org
Monday, June 21, 2004
GMail is gee... unavailable.
Well Google must have dumped a load of invites onto everyone this morning because message boards across the net seems to be swamped with people offering free invites to signup for GMail.
A friend sent me an invite and just as I had finished the signup process another invite came into my inbox. I’ve posted in request threads all over the place so someone sent me an invite. Thanks to both of you! I’ve only used the one invite so far but I’ll use the other one soon as the GMail service shows any life.
I was able to signup and create my account, I think. Well I filled out the signup page and hit submit and it seemed to work except I got a nice
quote:
Server Error
GMail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Now I tried to start over but it says my invite has already been used so I figure that means the account is created. I’ve tried logging into my account for the last 4-5 hours and been completely unable to. I believe Google gave everyone a bunch of invites and they’ve just become swamped with the new signups. Hopefully this is only a temporary thing. There’s been such a high demand for GMail accounts and I’m afraid Google underestimated their hardware needs and just don’t have a large enough system for the loads.
Actually, now that I think about it perhaps this is all planned. Google dumped all the invites in order to see how far they could push their system. They knew they would have a huge influx of users. They could watch to see how many it takes to bring the system to its knees. They will then be able to calculate how much more they need to scale out in order to handle daily usage when it finally does go live.
Well either way I guess I’ll just keep trying to get in like probably millions of others are. Soon as I can with my first account I’ll create a second email account. If I get any invites I’ll be giving them to friends and family so don’t bother asking because I have at least a dozen plus people that will get an invite first.
**UPDATE** (06/21 at 05:30 PM)
Sorry, my normal policy is that I don’t edit posts and I only make one post a day. However, I was just reading the UserFriendly comic strip and thought it was funny since it pretty closely shows how I reacted this morning with I got my first GMail invite.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040621
Yea, sure enough soon as I posted the entry I tried again and could get in!
Figures I’d jinx myself and make me look like a goofball… 
on 06/21/2004 at 04:02 PM
Yeah I had on and off problems today with Gmail too. One thing about google services though is that even in beta they are rarely broken for a long time.
Still can’t into mine all day :/ Other people are having no problems logging in :/
I was wanting a gmail invite anyone have one they can send?
Hi,
I ran across your site when doing a google search for ‘gmail service unavailable’. Your site was #1 on the search. I have yet to have any problems, but with 5+ hours without my account, Gmail is a load of horse shit. Who needs unreliable email?
I agree with your politics btw. I have to listen to liberal nutcases blame Bush <even today>. If sKerry had won by <one> vote, they would’ve said how legit it was. Bush gets the largest turnout in history and they are trying their best to ignore it. More votes than JFK, Carter or Clinton got!
Thanks for letting me vent. I need to throw my own blog like this up on a linux box. Hopefully it wasn’t too hard to set up.
God Bless America
Marc
I’ve been using my gmail account all day. I believe I was having troule with it the same day Alan posted this, but today I am fine.
I’m one of those liberal nutcases and I’m not sure that we are crying about this election any more than a few people looking in to very strange results in some voting districts. I think that mostly the democrats are looking at why we lost in the big races and won in the small ones.
If anyone asked me right now who won I would say George Bush without hesitiation because I am a rational human being and I process the information provided to me. I think we have become so partisan that we know what eachother are going to say before we say it and we formulate our argument. “Preemptive argument” is what I call it. 
We’re not going for goals that are much different, but we did apparently pick teams and that is all that matters to most of us.
That aside guess who got the second most votes of any presendential candidate in history. A related question is this; guess who had the most votes against him in presendential campaign history.
Lucky you! A friend gave me an invite a few days ago. I just checked and I could log in.