Google Calendar suffered a major outage on Thursday, the second crash in the past week for the company’s hosted calendaring application.
Thursday’s problem, which Google acknowledged at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time, affected a majority of Calendar users and locked them out of their accounts. Google declared the issue resolved at 1 p.m., according to information on the Google Apps Status Dashboard.
On Wednesday last week, Google Calendar had an outage and performance problems that affected some users for about an hour, after “an unusually large” number of synchronization requests from the mobile Android platform bogged down servers, according to Google.
Calendar is offered as a free, standalone application for individual use, and also as part of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication suite for workplaces.
The reliability of hosted applications like Google Calendar is in the spotlight as cloud computing gains in popularity and as vendors like Google encourage organizations to ditch on-premise software with the promise of simplified IT administration and lower costs.