Google, please Sync!

On Friday I was about to make a phone call using my iPhone when all of the sudden about three-quarters of my contacts disappeared. My calendar and my e-mail were still working great, but Contacts was having some serious issues. I initially chalked it up to an overtaxed iPhone so I rebooted only to find that the Contacts problem still persisted. About ten minutes later the contacts re-appeared and since I hadn't experienced the problem again, thought it might just be a temporary hiccup.

Well, as luck would have it, I am experiencing the same problem today, but this time there's an official report behind it. According to Google, the company is experiencing some issues with Google Sync due to an extended problem with one of its datacenters. Apparently the issue has been going on since the weekend but is now getting significantly worse.

The company is reassuring us that none of our information is lost, but that Push isn't "working very well" because they're batching up fetch requests to cope with the traffic.

Google has also said that the Sync issues are only affecting Google Sync for iPhone, Windows Mobile and S60.

I definitely appreciate Google making it known that it's having issues with its Sync service. I had only rebooted once but if I continued to experience the issues this morning, I would have had to really start troubleshooting.

By the way, it's no wonder that the problem is worse today, since people are working again which means even more traffic that needs to be synced. Someone at Google obviously figured that one out and had an employee post up the explanation before the rest of the time zones woke up and started syncing for the day.

I'm a huge fan of Google Sync, but with all things Google that are free, sometimes the services go down and we're left praying for their return. I'm now praying to the Google gods yet again.