Millions of Gmail users were unable to access their accounts yesterday when Google’s servers crashed, but no reason was given for the outage until the company updated its official blog.
Google engineering vice president Ben Treynor wrote on the blog that routine maintenance on some of the company’s servers caused mail traffic to overload backup servers.
“At about 12:30pm Pacific time a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!” This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.”
“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.”
At least two major businesses in Britain were unable to access their email systems because of the outage, with millions of individuals also unable to send or receive mail. The outage comes at a time when Google is attempting to convince both individuals and businesses to switch to the online Google Apps suite as a Microsoft alternative.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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