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Google Blames Gmail Troubles On Maintenance Goof

Posted by timothy on from the well-that's-reassuring dept.

Slatterz writes "Google has apologised for the two-and-a-half-hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to data center maintenance. 'Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we are very sorry. We did everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now resolved,' said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post. Google had been testing new code designed to keep data geographically closer to its owner, which brought about disruption when maintenance in one data center caused another facility to be overloaded. This had a cascade effect, according to Google, and it took the company an hour to get it back under control."

16 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Problems with Jabber connections to GMail users by Jon_Hanson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe it's related to this but I noticed this past weekend that the Jabber server running on my Linux machine no longer can get presence information for people on GMail/GTalk. From the logs I can see my server attempting to make a connection but nothing happens after 20 seconds and my server gives up for the time being. I haven't changed anything on my side but I'm unsure who to contact about issues like these.

    1. Re:Problems with Jabber connections to GMail users by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not sure, but it's not just you. I use a couple of different clients for work communication (the dozen people in my company telecommute) - Gtalk, Trillian, Adium, and fring on my cellphone. My boss got snarky one day recently because he said my status said available, but I was unresponsive all day. After investigating, I saw the same thing. If I set my status away on any of the non-official clients, it wouldn't propogate out. So it's a two way issue, not just one.

    2. Re:Problems with Jabber connections to GMail users by emag · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Been this way since at least last Thursday (Feb 18) for me. I have several contacts ($grandboss, $director (who's out sick), and $wife among others) that insist on using GMail/GTalk, all of them went "remote-server-not-found" last week, with no changes on my end. As a lark, I restarted my XMPP server, without it making a difference. If I had to guess, server federation was deactivated on the Google end, out that's just a WAG on my part.

      --
      "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
    3. Re:Problems with Jabber connections to GMail users by SCPRedMage · · Score: 5, Funny

      see what i did there? i mixed some code in appropriately (= instead of is saves me one character)

      Which you promptly wasted by explaining what a jackass you are...

      --
      My sig can beat up your sig.
  2. So you're saying... by Narnie · · Score: 4, Funny

    the cloud can breakdown? WTF? I thought cloud computing fixed any conceived computer problem out there.

    damn marketing bs...

    --
    greed@All_Evils:~#
  3. Thanks a LOT Google... by Tarmus · · Score: 5, Funny

    So you're saying I *didn't* need to throw my iPhone out the car window the other day? I hit some poor lady right on the noggin with it.

    --
    Punch drunk, and without bail.
  4. "Maintenance goof?" by mea37 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, sure, if the janitor brought down the service, that's pretty bad, but it seems a bit harsh to start calling him a "maintenance goof" ...

    (tip your bartenders and waiters)

  5. It's almost like.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. Gmail is Beta or something.

  6. This is why we're still beta. by buddyglass · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nobody complain about that silly beta label anymore.

  7. Fast-forward 100 years... by glebd · · Score: 5, Funny

    "As the stunned world slowly recovers from 2.5 hours of complete hibernation, digging through wreckage, restarting life support systems we all came to depend on, re-animating accidentally dead and restoring their brains from backups (provided backups are available and reasonably error-free), Google has apologised for causing 'the disruption' and blamed it on a maintenance goof in the Google Cloud, said GCloud site reliability manager Acacio Cruz IV v10.0.013 in a BrainTwitter post. We can only envy our ancestors who used to just lose access to their electronic mail via primitive personal computers when Google was having a glitch."

    1. Re:Fast-forward 100 years... by jnuzzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a FREE service. I don't have a problem with an outage when the service is free. It's when I pay for a premium service, they can't keep it stable, and finally raise my rate to cover their idiocy that p*sses me off.

    2. Re:Fast-forward 100 years... by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Google has a better uptime than any pay email service I know of anyways. I'm pegging Gmail at around 4 9s and the search engine to around 5~6. Most ISPs get 2 9s and business ISPs 3, 4 if you hit the ISP jackpot (even then i'd be shocked). So how are people so up in arms about this? Sheesh if you saved it up you'd get a day off once every 30 years. Which reminds me, nevermind ISPs. You get less uptime for ELECTRICITY in north america than you do google, going just on the continent wide outage a few years back.

  8. Re:Beta = Test Environment by sloth+jr · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are all manner of tests, and sooner or later, you do have to test in production. It's important to know that in cloud computing, there are certain kinds of tests that are only possible in production; production load is the surest way to characterize your application and platform. Who knows where in the deployment lifecycle this happened? Someone at Google, certainly, but not us.

  9. My bad. by Maintenance+Goof · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry, My bad.

  10. Re:Beta = Test Environment by lefiz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Google is an innovative company, and innovation often includes trial and error as well as improvements to an original idea. No one makes you use their products, and in this case, gmail is only one of many email providers. If you would prefer slightly more reliability from a corporation providing a product guarantee, feel free to look elsewhere. I like the way gmail works much more than any other email app I've tried, and am happy to accept the occasional issue, especially for all of the positive developments that have come from continued work on the project. Remember not so long ago when you couldn't chat in gmail?

  11. Stop complaining people, it wasn't that big a deal by haruchai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First off, it's free, it gives you 7 Gigs of mail storage and it's accessible from any where or any device with an Internet connection.
    It searches through my 4 years of e-mail faster than Outlook ( in cached Exchange mode) can search
    the last week. They keep adding features - for free;
    have no annoying Flash ads and the ones they do have are off on the extremes of the page.

    If you don't like it, stop using them - I promise you there won't be any pesky cancellation fees.
    Hotmail and Yahoo await you and we'll miss you all - maybe.

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body