You know every time Google’s Gmail service goes down for a bit, people freak out and lose their shit. It’s somewhat justified because so many rely on the search giant’s services, so a short lapse in production will get people charged up.
Google apologized yesterday for any delays users may have suffered, adding that most messages were unaffected. The search explained that only 29% of messages were delayed by a couple of seconds, with only 1.5% of messages being critically delayed by a couple of hours. The issue lasted for about 8 hours, starting at around 5:30 am PST. Additionally, the company went further in detail explaining what had happened, by issuing this statement:
The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. The two network failures were unrelated, but in combination they reduced Gmail’s capacity to deliver messages to users, and beginning at 5:54 a.m. PST messages started piling up. Google’s automated monitoring alerted the Gmail engineering team within minutes, and they began investigating immediately. Together with the networking team, the Gmail team restored some of the network capacity that was lost and worked to repurpose additional capacity, clearing much of accumulated message backlog by 1:00 p.m. PST and the remainder by shortly before 4:00 p.m. PST.
Of course, Google along with other major companies who hold our data, is constantly working hard to improve things so delays like this happen less often. Everything should be good with Gmail now, though.
Via 9to5Google