You've Got A Date With FAIL, It's On Your Google Calendar

Google wants us to move all of our data to the cloud. And yet, they keep having issues where a service that many people rely heavily on goes down. The latest is Google Calendar, which has been down for many people for well over an hour now.

The App Status Dashboard, and Google Calendar’s Twitter account confirm the disruption, but won’t say what caused it. We have an email into Google as well and will update when we hear back. The Dashboard is listing it as a “Service disruption” rather than a “Service outage,” as it appears that it’s not hitting all users — but judging from Twitter reactions it’s at least thousands, if not more.

Over the past year, Gmail, Google’s most important web app, has had a series of highprofile outages. Plenty of services, including Google’s, often get disrupted for a few minutes at a time, but these issues have been of a much larger scale, some as long as a few hours.

Obviously, the more that keeps happening, the harder it’s going to be to sell people on the idea of storing all their data online. Unless, of course, there’s an offline element. Google has that by way of Gears, but it’s ditching Gears in favor of HTML5 offline capabilities. However, not all browsers support that yet.

Update: More from App Status:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Calendar affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar. We will provide an update by April 28, 2010 11:36:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Update 2: Google says the issue has been resolved. From the App Status page:

The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.