Gmail’s Sudden Power Outage

On Tuesday afternoon, around 2:30 P.M. Central Time, the unthinkable happened. Gmail was inaccessible for a whopping 100 minutes! One of the longest 100 minutes I’ve known.

The official Gmail Blog posted a lengthy apology and explanation for the outage just hours after the problem was addressed and fixed. The source of the problem started with a routine upgrade of a section of Gmail servers. When this kind of routine update takes place, the traffic to the servers are redirected to other similar servers. However, when Tuesday’s updates were taking place, the redirecting component, called request routers, were overloaded and eventually shut down. Then, in turn, the next request routers were also overloaded and shut down.

Google’s monitoring system caught the traffic jam in seconds but took them a little longer to find a solution. The third largest email service in the world is back up and running, with more assurance that a similar outage will not happen again.

During the little-over-an-hour time frame that Gmail was down, Twitter was hit hard with tweets about the incident. In just minutes, over 20,000 tweets came up in a search for “Gmail.” The panic of Gmail users hit Twitter hard and probably could have shut down Twitter like the incident back in early August where the site was hit by an outside source until an outage occurred. Thank goodness Gmail is more prepared than Twitter for these kinds of situations!