That's what I'm figuring. When I log into either of my Gmail accounts, I see the vowelless (sp?) left side of the page, but a perfectly intact right side.
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Keith Johnson <keithbjohn...@comcast.net>wrote: > > > Okay, April Fool's Day it is... > > > > > > ********************************************************** > > http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.html > Today’s vowel > outage<http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.html> > Thursday, April 01, 2010 6:49 AM Posted by Sam Schillace, Gmail > Engineering Director > > If you logged into Gmail over the last hour (or visited the Gmail > homepage), you probably noticed that something looked a bit off: all the > vowels are missing. We realize this makes things difficult for all of you > who rely on Gmail — whether at home or at work — and we’re incredibly sorry. > We take morphological issues like this extremely seriously, so we want to > let you all know what happened and what we're doing about it. > > 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.) > > Over the last hour we've received numerous reports of this issue via our > help forums, from colleagues at Google, and via email you’ve sent us. Some > of you have already found creative workarounds for communicating without > vowels, like Aaron, who sent us this: > > > <http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JE4qNpFW6Yk/S7PvkBdO1DI/AAAAAAAAAiY/6C2rq7OHkiA/s1600/vowelfail.jpg> > Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% > full letter uptime reliability we strive for. Since identifying the root > case of this issue, we’ve started bringing vowels back to Gmail, so you > should see them back in your account within the next few hours if you don’t > already. In the meantime, while you may still see this issue in Gmail's web > interface, both IMAP and POP access are functioning normally. We'll post an > update as soon as things are fully resolved and, again, we're v3ry s0rry. > > Update (7:30 am): We’ve determined that the letter 'y' is not impacted. > >
