Google Addresses Yesterday’s Gmail Outage

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.”

Read more: switched.com