Gmail Outage Also Seems to ... Make Chrome Crash?

"Weird to think an error in some data center can reach its quavering tentacle into your laptop and bring down one of your apps."

Quavering cloud tentacle creeping over from Gmail to Chrome (Adapted from flickr/stankus )

In today's episode of The Cloud's Unexpected Consequences, I've now heard from dozens and dozens of my Twitter followers who've experienced Chrome crashes in just the last half an hour. In fact, this very blog you're reading has experienced four crashes across two correspondents. Chrome is normally stable (for us, at least). What's going on?

Well, you may have noticed that Gmail has been going in and out of service. And you may or may not have realized this, but Chrome syncs with your Google Account, including Gmail. So -- and this part remains speculative -- but a borked Gmail may mean a borked Chrome. An error in The Cloud means a crashed app here on my desktop.

Or as the always quotable author and media inventor Robin Sloan put it, "Weird to think an error in some data center can reach its quavering tentacle into your laptop & bring down one of your apps," Sloan tweeted.

Indeed.

If the syncing is really the problem, you may be able to fix the problem by unsyncing your account with Chrome. Go to chrome://chrome/settings/ and click "Disconnect your Google Account." Take that quavering tentacle of The Cloud!

Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.