Some went retro.
Some went into the woods.
Some followed the money.
Some wished for more booze.
Some were sarcastic, perhaps? (Like Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek.)
Some got curious about the code.
Some felt unlucky to be among the chosen few.
Some twiddled thumbs.
Some were upset, but self-aware enough to have perspective.
Some went into shock.
Some started fretting like it was 1999.
Some got their lunchtime amusement from reading angry tweets.
Some were really, really, really not finding this funny. No, seriously. Not even kidding.
Some saw a major life change.
Some extreme northerners found this funny.
Some were just ready to go home again.
Plenty saw the upside
Some found inner strength they never knew they had.
We're curious about what Viagra ads have to do with it. But we probably don't want to know.
and everyone was relieved when it was over.
To the list of essential utilities we can’t live without — electricity, gas, water — you’d better add one more:Gmail.
The free Google email service now has 350 million users in 54 languages. So when it experienced an outage that affected a small subset of users for around half an hour Tuesday, the resulting cacophony on Twitter read like the end of the world.
According to Google, the problem affected roughly 2% of all Gmail users. (Anecdotally, that sounds about right — only one user in the Mashable office was affected.)
But 2% of 350 million is still a whole lot of upset, especially when it comes to a service that seems to govern all its users’ Instant Messages as well as vital email. Many services we can live without for 30 minutes of our work day; Gmail, apparently, is not one of them. (Heck, even if the electricity goes down in your building, you can still work from your 3G smartphone.)
It may not be the case that all 7 million afflicted took to Twitter to voice their concerns, their stress, their withdrawal or their amusement, but it certainly felt like it. “#Gmail” became a trending hashtag, and “#Gfail” was surely not far behind.
We’ve collected a somewhat random sampling of reactions to the service outage. Some put the problem in perspective; others less so. Check out the gallery above, and let us know in the comments below: Where were you when Gmail went down?
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