According to Google’s official Gmail blog, the culprits behind Gmail being offline for more than an hour on Tuesday were overloaded servers.
“As we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes placed on the request routers,” Google’s Ben Treynor wrote on the Gmail blog. “At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific 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!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them also to become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded.”
Engineers of the email service were quick to respond though. After being alerted of the problem, they quickly went to work and brought additional request routers online.
And they’re not stopping there too. Over the next few weeks, the company will be implementing changes to make their routers work better and further improve reliability, Treynor said.
“We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again,” he assured the public.
All hands on deck guys! 😉
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/171288/gmail_outage_caused_by_overloaded_servers.html
