Gmail was down from about 12:30 p.m. PDT Tuesday to about 2:30 p.m. PDT, affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.
According to Google, the problem began when it took several Gmail servers offline for maintenance, a routine procedure that normally is transparent to users. However, the twist this time around was that Google had made some changes to the routers that direct Gmail traffic to servers in hopes of improving reliability, and those changes backfired.
Google fixed the problem by allocating traffic across the rest of its prodigious network, a luxury that it enjoys given the resources it has put in place to operate the world's leading search engine. But what's next?
Google said it would focus on making sure that the request routers have sufficient headroom to handle future spikes in demand, as well as figuring out a way to make sure that problems in one sector can be isolated without bringing down the entire service. "We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements -- remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity," Treynor wrote.
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