It wasn't just Apple with a birthday on April 1, Gmail's birthday is April 1, too, although Apple arrived in 1976, making it 45, while Gmail arrived in 2004, making it 17.
Gmail offered 1000MB or 1GB of storage at a time when Microsoft's then-Hotmail service offered 10 or 100MB, from memory, and it was such a big jump in 2004 that people thought it was an April Fool's joke.
Gmail has grown in leaps and bounds since then, and very rarely does it go offline for long.
So, when Gmail went intermittently offline for me earlier today, and with Twitter one of the world's fastest information services on what's happening now, or at least in the Western world, I typed "Gmail" into Twitter's search box to see if anyone else was reporting an outage.
A site called Services Down had placed a tweet and asked anyone to retweet if they had experienced Gmail problems, asking the question if Gmail was down and giving a time and date earlier today for when they presumably received their first report.
#Gmail seems to be intermittently down for me... #gmaildown The inbox works but doing a search in your gmail is coming up as offline, and returning to the inbox isn’t working. Now it says it’s offline... https://t.co/nNCe0nc4YU
— Alex Zaharov-Reutt (@alexonline888) April 4, 2021
Of course, if you go to a service like Down Detector's record of Gmail issues https://downdetector.com.au/status/gmail/ or any major online service, you see little reports here and there all the time.
When there's a huge outage that lasts hours and affects just about everyone, you see huge spikes in the outage reports, but for the most part, outages happen here, there and everywhere.
They happen to different people across the planet, for a range of reasons that might have nothing to do with the online service itself - it could be a problem with your computer, your Wi-Fi, your Internet provider, a sub-sea cable break, malware, or other issues.
Given there was no mass reportage of widespread Gmail and Google outages, which has happened in the past from time to time as it has happened to many online services, it seemed logical that the problem would either resolve itself soon, which it did, or it would quickly escalate into something everyone was noticing.
It also makes you think that the AI in place still has a long way to go to predict and prevent these kinds of outages in the first place, proactively identifying and fixing problems rather than alerting a human of an issue either through an alert, or by the end-user experiencing said outage occurring.
Of course, having your email down for a few minutes or even a few hours is usually nowhere near as inconvenient as your water, electricity, gas, Internet or mobile service going down, but we all notice it when it happens, and given ever escalating cyber attacks from cyber criminals and even nation states, the fragility of digital civilisation has never been more apparent.
Indeed, if you aren't backed up six ways to Sunday, if you aren't using multi-factor authentication, if you don't use a VPN, or a password manager set to complex passwords, if you don't regularly update your computer and all of your connected devices, if you don't have a secondary computer or mobile phone connected to a different phone network in place as a backup, if you aren't using some kind of security software no matter your platform or device, then being attacked or disrupted in some way is inevitable.
Heck, it's inevitable even if you do all of those things, for no person is an island, and a disconnected device only has access to what is locally on the system or on physical storage devices, and nothing more - until you go online once more/
Some already ask if there is a precursor to cyberwar in progress in analysing the latest Solarwinds and MS Exchange hacks, among all manner of other security issues, as discussed at a recent CyAN event that was captured on video.
Anyway, in searching for Gmail on Twitter, I discovered this tweet from tech investor (and more) John Erlichman, to which I can add Clubhouse.
Things that didn't exist 20 years ago
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 2, 2021
iPhone
YouTube
TikTok
Android
iPad
Gmail
Tesla
Bitcoin
Netflix streaming
DoorDash
Chrome
Messenger
Zoom
FaceTime
Google Maps
Amazon Prime
Airbnb
Uber
Snapchat
Robinhood
Skype
Spotify
SpaceX
Searching through his recent tweets also reminded me that Gmail launched on April 1:
On this day in 2004: Gmail launches pic.twitter.com/0BVHzqIXz5
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 1, 2021
He also noted the Osborne was "the first successful portable computer" launched "on this day" in 1981:
On this day in 1981: first successful portable computer was released.
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 3, 2021
It cost $5,200 in today’s prices and weighed about 25 pounds. pic.twitter.com/kGWppfYeqx
In addition, the first mobile call was made today in 1973:
On this day in 1973: the first mobile phone call was made. pic.twitter.com/sqeKZXyrU6
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 3, 2021
Indeed, he tweets a lot of very interesting facts, like the number of Google employees since it started, 8 when it began and 135,301 in 2020, or the average time per day looking at smartphones, which has grown to 3 hours and 19 minutes in 2021, from 22 minutes in 2011.
He also posted this fascinating clip from a Ben Affleck interview, where Affleck was talking in 2003 about what would end up today as Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Apple Music and other services because of file sharing, and listening to him, he was right!
Ben Affleck in 2003 on the future of music and tv streaming services:
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 2, 2021
(4 years before Netflix streaming and 5 years before Spotify launched)pic.twitter.com/iDq8MrJAqI
Anyway, every day has a milestone of some kind attached to it, but it still interesting to rediscover these things because it's easy to forget.
Despite all of our technological advancement, we're still in the B&W era of technology when we compare ourselves to the imaginations of sci-fi writers.
Even so, we're living in a golden era, but it's still one that could come crashing down due to financial or environmental collapse, or war, or even the ongoing shock the pandemic has given us.
That said, COVID-19 has massively accelerated digital transformation, which is still ongoing today, so with any luck, the best is still yet to come, whatever issues we have to muddle through as a species and a civilisation on the way to a better, multi-planetary, galactic and multi-galactic future.
Let's just hope that our sci-fi future is one that's closer to a freedom-loving utopia than the dystopian nightmares so many sci-fi movies warn humanity to avoid - one that's closer to, say, Star Trek, than to the much more dystopian Dark Matter, Star Wars or Firefly.
That could well just be wishful thinking that disregards how the world really works, but until we get there, we're here, dealing with outages and pandemics.
May the force be with us all - we're going to need it!
