Google Calendar outages anger users

Computerworld - Users of Google Calendar are angry and frustrated that they have been unable to access the Web-based application at various times over the past two weeks.

Google Inc., in a note on its Calendar help page, said Google Calendar was "experiencing temporary performance issues" that were affecting users of Google Account and Google Apps. It gave no indication of when the problem would be fixed.

Google Calendar users who are unable to access their calendars are venting their frustrations on the Google Calendar Troubleshooting Group.

Most of the users trying to access their calendars said they get an error message that reads, "One or more of your selected calendars could not be loaded at this time. You can try to reselect the hidden calendars in a few moments."

"I am really sick of this," one user said today. "When are they going to fix this piece of garbage? I rely on this all the time and now I cannot even sync my BlackBerry to my calendars. What's going on? When are they going to fix this problem?"

Another user who received this error message, "Oops, we couldn't load details for your calendar, please try again," said, "I'm also angry. ... Anyone know what the deal is?"

One user who's been testing Google Calendar from a work environment for the past two weeks said he's experiencing intermittent problems with the application.

And another said, "Please, this is painful. No calendars for our 'Google Apps Premier Edition' users since 8:30 a.m. Eastern (today). Can we get some kind of update?"

A Google spokesman today acknowledged that some users were having problems accessing Google Calendar and that the company was working quickly to fix the problem. "We know how important Calendar is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, the spokesman said in an e-mail. "We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to contact the Google Calendar support team through the Google Calendar Help Center."

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