Bug Caused Gmail Outage Globally
Google services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents suffered an outage on Friday that took down Gmail for about an hour.
Google first acknowledged the outage at 11:12 a.m. Pacific Time and said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved.
The outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States.
According to Google, the issue has been resolved, and the company's engineers are focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage.
Google said that an internal system that generates configurations - essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave - initially encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services, caused users' requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Engineers cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration and by 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users' service was restored.
Yahoo, which also runs a rival mail service, seized the moment to post a screenshot of the Gmail error page to Twitter. Yahoo later apologized and deleted the tweet.
The outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States.
According to Google, the issue has been resolved, and the company's engineers are focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage.
Google said that an internal system that generates configurations - essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave - initially encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services, caused users' requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Engineers cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration and by 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users' service was restored.
Yahoo, which also runs a rival mail service, seized the moment to post a screenshot of the Gmail error page to Twitter. Yahoo later apologized and deleted the tweet.