Gmail dragged down by overloaded servers

Gmail went down on Tuesday, causing complications for businesses and individuals around the world. Google's official Gmail blog said the crash was caused by a traffic jam on its servers, and they are working to make sure it won't happen again.

The problem occurred when some recent changes designed to improve traffic flow on request routers overloaded the system because workers took some Gmail servers offline to perform routine upgrades.

"As we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes placed on the request routers," Ben Treynor, Site Reliability Czar 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."

The problem lasted for about 100 minutes around the world. "We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again," Treynor wrote.

One fix the company is working on is to make sure routers slow down when overloaded, instead of refusing to accept traffic. Nevertheless, this is just another sign that the Internet and its enabling systems must be kept up to speed at all times because silence is not golden.

For more on Gmail's outage:
- check out this NetworkWorld.com article

Related Articles:
Google releases plug-in for Microsoft Outlook
Google explains outage, apologizes
Post outage, Google makes more tweaks to Gmail
Google apologizes, explains Gmail outage