Gmail blackout blamed on "data centre overload"

 

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Posted on 25 Feb 2009 at 08:26

Google claims that yesterday's Gmail blackout was caused by one of its data centres becoming overloaded.

The Google webmail service was down for much of yesterday morning (UK time), with visitors to the Gmail website being presented with blank pages.

Google claims that server issues were responsible. "There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centres," the company's Gmail site reliability manager, Acacio Cruz, explains on the Gmail blog. "This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data centre."

"Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data centre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data centre to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."

"The bugs have been found and fixed, and we're in the process of pushing out changes."

The failure of Gmail - which has a 99.9% monthly uptime guarantee for paying professional users - has sparked a huge debate over our increased reliance on cloud computing services.

This was no more clearly illustrated than by Google's own press officer, who when contacted by PC Pro for comment on Gmail's disappearance told us: "I'd send you this statement by email, but I can't".

"We know how painful an outage like this is - we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you," Cruz concludes. "We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future."

Author: Barry Collins