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Update: Google says sorry about the GMail outage. That’s good enough for me. Here is what Todd Jackson, GMail product manager had to say on the company blog.

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.

Original post below the fold. Continue »

In Beijing, Internet access will soon be in high demand: Half a million people are expected to visit the city of 17 million for the Olympics, and most of them will want web-based access to personal and corporate sites. This may well be the largest international remote access event ever. Much of the attention has been around whether visitors can surf the Internet. But some people are wondering whether they should. Is it safe to surf from China?

“With Software-as-a-Service applications, more users will access their applications across the Internet, so companies can’t rely on physical or firewall access,” said Marc Gaffan, director of product marketing for RSA’s Identity and Access Assurance Group. “The risks are significantly increased.” The U.S. government’s head of counter-espionage, Joel Brenner, is also cautioning travelers to Beijing about identity theft and other threats.

Most users assume that a secure web connection makes them safe. After all, that little yellow SSL padlock doesn’t just mean your traffic is encrypted, it also tells you the URL you’re visiting is the one you wanted — right? Not always, said Jayson Agagnier, a security consultant who specializes in corporate counter-espionage. “On older browsers, the padlock will still be there even if the user accepts a certificate that is not publicly signed.” Continue »

After a long dry spell, technology initial public offerings took a small step towards a comeback as Rackspace Hosting, a San Antonio, Texas-based company, announced its IPO. The company that will trade on the NYSE under the ticker RAX is selling about 15 million shares at $12.50 each, in the process raising about $187.5 million from the market. That would give the company a valuation of around $1.45 billion. Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch are joint bookrunners on this deal. The deal should come as a big win for local VC heavyweights Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, too — they own 16.2 percent and 11.6 percent of RackSpace respectively.

The company had wanted to raise around $276 million (by selling up to 17 million shares at $16 a pop), but had to settle for a much lower valuation, one that is reflective of today’s tenuous economy. The fact that Rackspace has gotten out of the gate in the dog days of summer is a good sign for similar high-revenue, high-quality tech companies in the pipeline. In a previous article we noted that Rackspace was raising money to expand its hosting infrastructure, expand rapidly into the fast-growing cloud computing sector and to offer services for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Disclosure: Rackspace is an advertiser on the GigaOM Network.

Telecom giant AT&T announced its version of a cloud computing service today, called Synaptic Hosting, but to make things horribly unclear (and perhaps keep enterprise customers happy) it decided it should call the effort everything from utility computing to a hosting solution. I’m not sure if the entire service counts as a cloud, but AT&T does say that it will “support large-scale computing and applications on demand via virtualized servers and deliver services across AT&T’s Internet Data Center hosting infrastructure.”

So it does seem that despite the continued use of the words hosting and utility computing peppered throughout the announcement, that somewhere there is a cloud. My guess is there are a whole range of services being offered here, all with an AT&T service-level agreement. That could interest cloud-leery enterprise customers.

The key advantage to AT&T’s service is that it controls not just the servers and the cloud, but it also owns the network that those bits of data must traverse to get from the cloud to your computer. That’s a powerful proposition because it gives AT&T one more potential point of failure that it can guarantee and control. It also could lead the way for some interesting pricing options given that AT&T will know exactly how much it costs for each byte of storage and each compute cycle, but it also has the wholesale costs of bandwidth.

Want to define the cloud? Check out these posts for some help:

• How Cloud and Utility Computing Are Different
• Defogging the Cloud