for the first time i've received a mail from google about the calendar maintenance.

"....
Hello Luca,

We wanted to inform you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 . During this time, this service may be unavailable to some of your users. Please inform your users about this planned maintenance appropriately. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Google Calendar.

If you have any questions, you can contact the Google Apps Support team through the Google Apps Help center (http://www.google.com/support/a/).

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

   Please do not reply directly to this message. Please contact us through the Google Apps Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/a/) if you have any questions..."

maybe new features will be soon introduced?

Yes, I just got this too and also found it odd as I've never gotten such an email from them. It's not like they haven't rolled out new features or made changes while keeping a service up, and in fact this is the first time I've been emailed about planned maintenance for any of their services.

So I agree, Luca...either they're really expanding/modifying the infrastructure/backend, or they're rolling out some major changes.

I've actually received 6 of these so far today... you would think they would unique by Email address!

I've received a few notices from them in the past... but it indeed is rare

sorry... make that 8

I got it twice! What the?

argh!!! 10 now

Weird, I haven't gotten any emails about this.

Is this only for the Google Apps version of Google Calendar?

Colin, are you using Google Apps? I don't think users of Google Calendar are getting this, just administrators in Google Apps.

i have just recieved this email

Travis,
i think they've sent my email to you :P

i didn't get any email from them yet..

lol...
spken too soon.
i just got it .. XD

i want it i want it!
lol

there is a lot of maintaince goin on.. Both steveR and me have noticed the latency in services.. It appears that a SMTP cron could be out of order and disrupting servics and creating redundant emails. n fact they have shut doen analytics I think!1

I think that they send it once to the Gmail address used to sign up for Google Apps and once to the Administrator address for each domain (which most of you probably have forwarding to your Gmail account like me anyway). I got four copies since I've got two domains hosted there.

Maybe these alerts are a sign of things to come. Hopefully they'll be warning people about maintenance more often. I wonder, does this count as downtime?

It's interesting that they apparently believe we're all in the same time zone, presumably Pacific.
Or maybe they actually do their maintenance in the users' local time zones. Must be quite hard, though, to reliably figure out what accounts are using what time zones, and make sure they're not affected outside the 8AM – 9PM time frame. Especially since those time frames in say, Tokyo and LA, don't overlap. :-)

   – Michael

picasaweb is down at 11:14pm france time

I too received 2 emails.
One for the admin email and one the support contact.
My GAFYD Calendar is still UP.

I also got two emails. It has been a long time since Google updated its calendar service. I hope they improve it! Perhaps make it more like iScrybe.com!!

I use GAFYD but more for test purposes so I haven't logged into that account in a while. Thats probably why I didn't see an email then.

Clarification from Google:

Earlier an email was sent regarding your [redacted] Google Apps account, notifying you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM PDT on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 (3PM GMT on April 26th to 4AM GMT on April 27th). We understand that maintaining the highest level of reliability and uptime is critical to your organization and to your end users. Thus, we want to provide you with additional information about the upgrade and explain in detail the impact it may have on your users – specifically, that only a subset of your users will be affected, and only for a few minutes each.

Why are we doing an upgrade?
We are updating some of our servers as we continue to improve Google Calendar. This is a normal maintenance update, and as with all updates we look to minimize the impact to our end users.

How will this impact my end users?
The impact to your users should be minimal. Only a subset of your users should be affected by the upgrade. These users may have trouble accessing their Google Calendars for a short period of time, generally less than 5-10 minutes each.

Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.

As always, we continuously look to improve our communication with our administrators. If you have any feedback or any additional questions regarding this maintenance upgrade, please feel free to contact the Google Apps Support team through the Google Apps Help center (http://www.google.com/support/a/).

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

   Please do not reply directly to this message. Please contact us through the Google Apps Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/a/) if you have any questions.

I got 2 mails per domain first & then 1 per domain again for update.

But doest it takes 13 hours to do the maintenance, isn't it little more asked for?

./Rohit

<< Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.
   >>

Temporary Error (502)


We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

got 12 original Emails and 12 of the updates :)

You can't Google isn't care enough to it's costumers huh Travis? :P

Update:
"The routine maintenance of Google Calendar that was planned between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. PDT on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 will not take place at this time. We expect future scheduled maintenance of Google Calendar to have no impact on users of Google Apps. In addition, we are actively working on changes in routine maintenance procedures for other products on the Google Apps platform so updates such as these will either take place outside of peak hours or not impact our customers at all. We are sorry for any confusion this has caused."

Source: David Berlind's Blog
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=449

Also talked about at ComputerWorld.com:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9017853&intsrc=hm_list

Was this sent out as an email update? Did anyone here get an email about this?

hah good thing google isnt sending mail letters cause thats alot of trees they woulda used up..