Gmail Faces Another Downtime

Gmail Faces Another Downtime

Gmail users were unable to access their emails for 90 minutes yesterday, leaving millions of users dismayed.


Google VP of engineering Ben Treynor explained the outage was fired up by some changes made to enhance the webmail's availability. Treynor further noted that the firm "slightly underestimated" the impact of the upgrade.



"At about 12:30 pm PST [8.30pm BST] 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!," Treynor added.



"This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more to become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people were unable to access Gmail via the web interface because their requests could not be routed to a Gmail server."



Treynor said Google has ensured the problem was resolved in no time. The firm has increased request for router capacity and made sure that they abase successfully.