Google Calendar unaccessible, angry users looking for alternatives

Mar 31, 2008 06:03 GMT  ·  By

Google's services are quite popular these days and every time one of them encounters more or less critical problems, users are the first to notice them. However, every unexpected and, more importantly, unresolved issue forces registered users to look for alternatives, although I'm sure nobody would want this. This is exactly what happened a few days ago when an unexpected error occurred and made Google Calendar unaccessible for most users.

Nobody knows for sure what happened with the service, but several errors were displayed just after the affected users entered their usernames and passwords: "One or more of your selected calendars could not be loaded at this time. You can try to re-select the hidden calendars in a few moments," one error said. "Events from one or more calendars could not be shown here because you do not have the permission to view them," another stated. Moreover, some users got a less self-explanatory error: "Oops, we couldn't load details for your calendar, please try again in a few minutes."

Obviously, users' reaction wasn't quite peacefully, many of them expressing their frustration in a Google Groups discussion started on March 28.

"This is such, you get what you pay, for buls**t. After all, it is free, right...? I would expect this from a Beta release of the calendar, but from what I understand this is not Beta, and the fact this is so problematic is incredibly irresponsible of Google," the user nicknamed sanman01 wrote. "What a joke, it was working and now its down again. I'm moving off of this garbage app. Can anyone make suggestions for other online calendars?" the same user continued.

Despite users' frustration, Google didn't provide too many information about the outage, as the company's only explanation was: "Due to technical issues, a subset of users may have difficulty accessing Google Calendar at this time. We're working to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience."