The Secret Adventures of WriterGirl

Current Theme Song (aka what's playing on my ipod right now): Forbidden Friendship by John Powell [How To Train Your Dragon soundtrack].


Ah, April Fool's Day. The day of often mean-spirited practical jokes (the ones played on me at least). So over the years, I grew a bit jaded with the whole thing. That is, until Google came around and renewed my affection for the quasi-holiday.

Not only are they renaming their entire corporation to Topeka, they almost always have a problem with their email servers around this time of the year. They really should have their tech guys look into that.

They have had many good gags, but this year is a doozy. They've apparently been disemvowelled. Yes, they have lost all their vowels.






Here is the official report:

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters 'a,' 'e,' 'i,' 'o,' and 'u.' As a result, we're experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter 'y' is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

But they're pretty smart cookies over there. I'm sure they'll have a handle on it soon. ;)


My favorite line?

Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% full letter uptime reliability we strive for.


Update (7:30 am): We’ve determined that the letter 'y' is not impacted.

So here's to you Google, for making a formerly blech holiday something to make me smile at again. :)