Switchfast Blog - The Future of IT

Gmail Outage Blamed on a Capacity Calculation Error

Wednesday, September 02, 2009 by Michael Holley

Yesterday's 100 minute Gmail outage that affected nearly all Gmail users was caused by a classic system overload that was made possible by some recent changes in Google's traffic routing system.

According to Ben Treynor, VP of Engineering and Site Reliability, Google "had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers." Treynor assures Gmail users that the issue is being taken very seriously and that the issues that caused the outage have been identified and are in the process of repair. You can read his post to the official Gmail blog here.

Considering that the biggest corporate fears involving Google's cloud-based applications are security and reliability, this is the worst kind of news for Google. Time will tell as to how this incident will affect the public's perception of Google's solutions, but you can bet that Google will go to great lengths to ensure that this doesn't happen again any time soon.

Best,

Michael Holley

Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Consulting & Support
Rochester IT Consulting & Support

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