When cloud apps fail

The time is 6pm. Since lunchtime I’ve tried to reach my Google Calendar to schedule an important business meeting and an opthalmist appointment.

This is what I see when I try:

It illustrates the dangers of cloud computing.

I’ve used Google Calendar with few hiccups since 2006 and even wrote about it for The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age.

Google Calendar has a neat straightforward interface and, best of all, I can view items on my desktop, on my iPad or on my phone.

In the past I’ve synched Google Calendar with desktop applications, I stopped doing that a few years ago and haven’t seen much disruption.

This outage isn’t a show-stopper yet, but it could be disastrous if, say, I was on the road with a full slate of appointments.

At times like this I have to acknowledge my other half, who always prints important things like schedules on paper, she may have a point. There's a paper Filofax sitting in my desk drawer, perhaps I should reinstate it.