If you are one of the thousands who use Google’s email services, Gmail, for private or professional purposes, you probably experienced the widespread outage that occurred yesterday. According to Ben Treynor, Vice President of Google, the outage, which lasted for approximately 100 minutes, occurred after Google took a small portion of Gmail’s servers offline in order to perform “routine upgrades”—a practice that is done frequently without problem or glitch. So what went so wrong yesterday?
According to The Official Google Blog, at about “12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.” As a result, by early afternoon, many users were unable to access their Gmail accounts.
The response was almost immediate, as now email-less users turned to Facebook and Twitter to post messages of outrage. By a little after 3pm PST the Google engineers had gotten the Gmail system up and running again.
Users have remained wary. There is no way for Google to promise that the same thing will not happen again and this outage only adds to list of minor issues that Gmail has suffered in the past months—most notably a two and a half hour outage in February. This malfunction was just the latest is what the Wall Street Journal called “a series of service hiccups,” and continues to raise questions about the reliability of the Gmail system and Google’s management of that software. Ben Traynor tried to reassure using in a blog post, saying that the “outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such,” but users remain frustrated and Google will have to work to regain the confidence of its users.