As Gmail and other Google services suffered a worldwide outage on Friday afternoon, causing mass hysteria on Twitter, Google's Site Reliability Engineering Team began a Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything"). Talk about terrible timing.
The two events could be totally unrelated, especially considering the Google employees on the AMA worked at the unrelated search, storage and infrastructure departments. But Redditors were quick to call out the engineers in the comments, quickly escalating the AMA into a sounding board for Gmail users to complain, troll and ask questions about fixing email.
Some highlights:
"So guys, where were you during the great gmail crash of 2014?" --ssjvash
"It's possible they have more pressing matters to attend to this very second than this AMA." --akiws
"Please explain in detail what goes on in a gmail outage like the one going on right now. Take your time." --raban
"Get back to work! Everything's borked!" --bollythewolf
"We're the currently unemployed Google Site Reliability Engineering team." --Commodore_64
And the pièce de résistance from Redditor YevP:
Several minutes into the AMA, at 2:47 p.m. ET, the Google team had to update their original AMA post with a link directing people to the company's app status dashboard for updates. It didn't help much.
By 3 p.m. ET, Gmail appeared to be back online for most users, after being down for approximately 50 minutes. But this Reddit AMA seemed to be dead on arrival.
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