Google Blames Data Centre Overload for Gmail Outage

Google Blames Data Centre Overload for Gmail Outage

Google has announced yesterday's Gmail outage was brought about by an overloaded data centre. The search company asserts that the server problems were responsible for the blackout which affected millions of users.


Acacio Cruz, Europe Gmail site reliability manager, said, "There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centres. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data centre."



Crus also added, "Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data centre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data centre to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."



Gmail was inaccessible for several hours yesterday. Users were getting a blank screen when trying to log in to their email accounts. Google declared the bugs which caused the service interruption were already found and fixed. The company also announced it is currently making various changes on the webmail service.