Colleges and universities that have outsourced eMail services to Google said the 100-minute Gmail outage on Sept. 1 proved inconvenient for students and professors, but many IT officials maintain Google’s service is superior to campus-run eMail.
Colleges, businesses, and other customers could not access their Gmail accounts for about an hour and half Tuesday after routine server upgrades caused an overload on Google’s routers. "As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server," according to a Sept. 1 Google blog post apologizing to customers for the outage.
Technology officials who have converted campus-wide eMail services to Google’s servers–and some IT administrators who are considering the move–said that despite the recent downtime, Google’s eMail service is more reliable than the competition.