Last week's Google Gmail outage demystified

It has been revealed that the downtime on Gmail last week was the direct result of heavy load to Google Contacts and not a failure of Gmail per se. This problem with Google Contacts directly resulted in degradation in Gmail's service and even knocked out the service for some users.

The Google engineering team had to temporarily disable access to Contacts from Gmail while they rectified the issue. I am inclined to believe Gmail's explanation, because it confirms the sequence of events last week.

What I found interesting though, was what triggered the problem with its Contacts service. According to Google, a combination of various factors brought about the high-load problem. This ranged from a network issue in a data center, a high overall utilization of the Contacts service, and an update on Gmail which has the effect of increasing the load where the Contacts service is involved.

Personally, I would applaud Google's reaction speed in fixing the issue. From the perspective of the complex architecture involved, it is a small miracle that everything got fixed so quickly. However, with everyone already on edge due to earlier outages--and nervous about Cloud computing as a whole--any additional outage is a serious setback.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek

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