Google has blamed Tuesday's
Gmail outage on routine maintenance in a European
datacentre.
Gmail's site reliability manager, Acacio Cruise,
posted an explanation for what happened on Google's blog. He
said, "There was a routine maintenance event in one of our routine
datacentres. This typically causes no disruption because accounts
are simply served out of another datacentre."
But he added, "Unexpected side effects of some new code that
tires 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 the company about an hour to get it back under
control.
Cruise said, "The bugs have been found and fixed, and we are in
the process of pushing out changes. We know how painful an outage
like this is - we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect
us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root
causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar
problems in the future."
