Google’s Gmail service was inaccessible last Tuesday in a severe outage that affected a majority of users who are relying on Google’s popular free e-mail service.
Google explained that Tuesday’s widespread outage occurred when the company took some servers offline to perform their scheduled routine maintenance. This caused its remaining routers to become overloaded with traffic.
Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering apologized on their blog ““Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such,”. He wrote” We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom”.
Twitter users were trading updates about Gmail’s problems and became the a top trending topic on that day.
Google reported Tuesday afternoon that it fixed the problem.