[gramakri]

If this had happened on self hosted email server, people would be claiming "this is why you don't self-host email". My company self hosts email and we have never had an outage of this sort. ever. All support emails to gmail accounts are now bouncing for us. It's also been more than 2 hours since this problem started.

[divbzero]

The analogous claim here would be: “This is why you don’t entrust critical services to third parties.”

[notriddle]

The name for this is "victim blaming." Someone suffers from a catastrophe (or from abuse, but that's not what happened here), and you imagine a way that it could've been avoided, never mind that things could've gone just as badly wrong the other way around.

[freehunter]

If everyone who uses Gmail hosted their own email servers those people would suffer far more and far worse outages that Google has had.

[octoberfranklin]

but not all at once

[freehunter]

But far more consistently. Most users have no idea how the Internet works, let alone hosting something as complex as email. They'd just stop using email and switch entirely to Facebook.

[rubatuga]

Also, never ever a 550 5.1.1 error.

[Ekaros]

On the same server... Was missing an email, went to look into other box that should have forwarded that. Got very suspicious looking email...

Good thing gmail wasn't completely stupid and didn't try to forward that one, getting in infinite loop...