At 2:12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Google reported it was
“investigating” a Gmail outage. By 3:23 p.m. the company reported on its
Google Apps dashboard that: “The problem with Gmail should be resolved.
We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and
continued support.”Still, the Gmail outage was magnified by its wide
reach, reportedly affecting parts of Europe,key programmer the
US, Canada, India, and elsewhere, according to TechCrunch, the
technology reporting website. It also, predictably perhaps, sent the
Twitter-sphere into overdrive with speculation and beefing about the
outage.RECOMMENDED: E-mail overload? Three ways to tame your in box.“I
have had nothing but TROUBLE with my Gmail accounts today!! I had so
much to do now I have to work through the night,” tweeted Tina Graves,
who is described on her Twitter page as an aspiring author."Oh, thank
goodness, GMail is back,” another Twitterer opined. “I was nervous I'd
miss out on my Bed, Bath, and Beyond newsletter.”As Gmail outages go,
this one was not huge – lasting 1 hour, 11 minutes, according to the
company’s Google Apps dashboard webpage. Google experienced a widespread
Gmail outage in 2009. On Sept. 23 of last year, a Gmail outage lasted
more than four hours and delayed 29 percent of all e-mails sent during
the work day, with 1.5 percent of e-mails delayed for hours. Gmail was
reported last year to have at least 400 million users.In that case, the
problem was attributed to a rare double network failure of two
independent systems that were supposed to back each other up. In
Friday's case, the company is still investigating the cause. Past cases
have often involved internal upgrades that went awry,Thai basil data industry experts say.
On
at least four occasions, Gmail downtime has been traced to software
updates in which bugs triggered unexpected consequences, reports Data
Center Knowledge, an industry trend-watching website. In February 2009, a
software update “overloaded some of Google’s European network
infrastructure, causing cascading outages at its data centers in the
region that took about an hour to get under control,” DSK reported. In
September 2009, Google underestimated the impact of a software update on
traffic flow between network equipment, overloading key routers – until
other equipment was added to dilute the flow, it said.The timing of the
outage was unfortunate for Google for another reason: Its
system-reliability engineers were – at almost the same moment that Gmail
went down – making themselves available to answer questions from the
curious on the news site reddit.com, via chat, about how Google ensures
its system reliability.“Hello, reddit! We are the Google Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. Our previous AMA from almost x431 GDSexactly
a year ago got some good questions, so we thought we’d come back and
answer any questions about what we do, what it’s like to be an SRE, or
anything else.”
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