Gmail outage blamed on server maintenance

The internet giant Google has been forced to issue a grovelling apology to the majority of its 150 million users after an engineer "miscalculation" caused a 100-minute Gmail service outage.

As well as affecting personal communications, the more pressing concern for many people was the impact the outage could have on their businesses. Many companies using Gmail rely heavily on Google Applications for things like document sharing, and the outage would have left many business inoperable.

Ben Treynor, Google's "Site Reliability Czar," said in a blog post, "we know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service."

Google were quick to confirm that they considered the outage a very "big deal" and were treating it as such, investigating ways to make sure the incident would never be repeated. The disruption was caused by an error during "routine upgrades" to the company's web servers. According to Treynor, the problem began when the company took a "small fraction" of servers off-line to perform routine maintenance, but underestimated the burden new changes to Gmail would have on request routers that direct traffic to Gmail servers. The request routers consequently became overloaded and stopped accepting requests, putting more burden on other request routers, starting a cascade that overloaded all of them within minutes.

However, any apologies will be small consolation to the many businesses whose production was impacted by the down-time, especially after outages of the Gmail service in February and March this year.

The outage lasted for over an hour, meaning business would most certainly have been heavily impacted as services including Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Analytics and video-sharing site YouTube, all went off-line.

The free version of Gmail has been ranked as the world's third most-popular e-mail program, behind similar services provided by Microsoft and Yahoo. However, this latest outage will be extremely hard to swallow for Google, as such failures, while rare, are damaging to the companies efforts in promoting Gmail and other services as high-level business communication solutions.

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