14 DAY TRIAL // Google touts reliability as one of the big advantages of using a cloud platform. But, of course, cloud services fail as well and, when one is used by millions of people, any problem is going to get users worked up. Google Calendar is currently experiencing issues and, though it only seems to affect a small minority of users, those losing events or encountering errors are not pleased.
"We're experiencing an issue affecting less than 0.001% of the Google Calendar user base. The affected users are able to access Google Calendar, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior," Google wrote in its app status dashboard, detailing the issue.
"We will provide an update by February 23, 2011 1:52:00 PM UTC+2 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem... Affected users may be missing entries in their calendars," it explained.
A further update notifies users that the problem is still ongoing and that Google will provide further information later on. It seems that Google's engineers are not entirely sure about the cause of the problem or how to fix it.
Apart from the updates on the status dashboard, Google hasn't made any other mentions of the problem. Initially, Google stated that 0.125 percent of Calendar users were experiencing issues.
It later updated the figure, indicating that very few people are actually having problems accessing their calendars. That said, for those depending on the app to keep their daily schedule, the issues could prove rather problematic.
Problems like this are likely to occur, at the scale at which most Google services operate. In fact, on the whole, most Google products, even the free ones, are rather stable and available for most users most of the time. Even now, only 10 in 1 million Calendar users may be having problems accessing events.
UPDATE: Google has announced that the problem has been fixed for some users and it's in the process of being alleviated for everyone.