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Google Addresses Yesterday's Gmail Outage

by Warren Riddle on September 2, 2009 at 10:35 AM


Google's Gmail service crashed yesterday afternoon at approximately 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, blocking users from their accounts for approximately 100 minutes. While this isn't the first outage to affect the e-mail service, Google representatives quickly issued an apologetic public statement yesterday, explaining exactly what occurred.

Ben Treynor, Google's Engineering and Site Reliability Czar, attributed the blockage to a server issue. He said Google engineers, performing routine maintenance tasks, took down a few Google servers but the rerouted traffic overloaded the "request router" servers, "which direct Web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response." A domino effect of crashing request routers ensued, blocking people from accessing Gmail through the Web interface. Treynor addressed frustrated Gmail users by saying, "I'd like to apologize to all of you -- today's outage was a Big Deal."

People around the Web agreed, at least for a little while, with many flooding Twitter to instantly voice their anger and confusion. The outage has now disappeared from the microblogging site's trending topics, though, and the tumult seems to have died down elsewhere around the Web, too. It seems that Google has stumbled upon the amazing revelation that an honest admission of fault, a sympathetic tone and a remorseful explanation can actually quell public anger. Quick, somebody tell the politicians. [From: GmailBlog and Business Insider]

Tags: e-mail, email, gmail, gmail outage, GmailOutage, google, server, top

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