Google Explains Gmail Outage

After the massive outage that left Gmail users in an uproar, Google has finally released an official statement on what happened and the steps they are taking to avoid a similar occurrence in the future. The 100 minute outage affected both normal Gmail accounts, and the business accounts.

As mentioned in the official statement, Google was performing routine updates before the outage happened. Here’s a snippet of the post:

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response.

As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

Google mentioned that they’re continuously working on various improvements to the service to make it more reliable.

Will the outage happen again? We’ll see.