Gfail: Gmail Goes Down for Nearly 2 Hours
It was a rough Tuesday afternoon for Gmail users as the service experienced problems that lasted nearly two hours.
Google yesterday evening took to its Gmail Blog to talk about what the company dubbed a "Big Deal." Detailing that the outage was because of a miscalculation of capacity, Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar, wrote that the company had already thoroughly investigated what happened, and was compiling a list of things it intended to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
It's nice to know the team has things under control, but what actually went wrong? Treynor says that yesterday morning the team took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades, a procedure that normally goes off without a hitch. Ben continued on to explain that this time the team underestimated the load that some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers. At approximately 12:30, a few of the request routers became overloaded and so, the load was transferred onto the remaining request routers. More became overloaded and it sort of went from there until they were all down.
Steps Google is taking to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again include increasing request router capacity, and figuring out a way to make sure problems in datacenter A don't affect datacenter B.
How many of you were unable to access your Gmail yesterday? Let us know in the comments below how you dealt with the outage!
- Netbook Sales Growth Outpaces Full Notebooks
- Asus Has an Nvidia Ion Nettop Dual-core Atom
- Intel SSDs Double in Price on Newegg
- Hitachi Announces New 7200 RPM Travelstar
- Nintendo Makes Opera Wii Web Browser Free
- Blizzard's Next MMO to be Different From WoW
- Blizzard: German StarCraft II Is Less Bloody
- The Pirate Bay Blocked by Ireland's Largest ISP
- WD Shipping 2 TB 7200 RPM Caviar Black HDD
- Free 90-day Windows 7 Enterprise Trial for IT
- Intel, Microsoft Show More Win 7 CPU Efficiency
- GTA 'Hot Coffee' Case Settled for $20 Million
- Infomercial Gadgets on Tom's Guide
- Thieves Clean Out Apple Store in Half a Minute
- Compal Recieves Nokia Order for 100K Booklets
- Acer's Nvidia Ion Revo Goes Dual-core Atom
- Sun-Oracle Deal Getting Probed by the EU
- Shots of OCZ's Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD
no gmail for me last night, i thought it was my router/isp, i remember thinking google would not have a problem. how wrong was i.
/uber
big deal, everyone can have problems, be it technical or attacks
they fixed it and then thats it
Another Google problem, that's worrying.
They've built up the reputation of being highly reliable and cool/human friendly. However, that could easily crumble and make way for a new top dog to take their place.
It IS about time that a new name came to the fore and became the household name for the average Job Bloggs computer user.
I do hope they get back on top of their reliability issues tho as I like Google, which is rare when it comes to massive corporations.
However, I was with my bank account manager at the time so didn't notice a drop.