Google downtime
Millions of surfers around the world use Google’s services every day for everything from finding snippets of information and emailing friends or business contacts, to working on projects with people in distant locations. The company has been around for more than 10 years now and it is difficult to imagine what the web would be like without Google.
Yet that is what thousands of surfers had to contend with on four occasions this year when various Google services have encountered technical problems and have gone offline for hours at a time.
Websites crash all the time. But when Google suffers an outage it can lead to widespread panic.
Email outage
In February this year, Google was forced to apologise to users of the Google Mail service, known as Gmail outside the UK, after many were unable to access their Inboxes for hours. News of the outage was broken on social networking site Twitter when several members complained they were unable to get to their email accounts.
Google explained that there had been simple technical reasons for the outage. “There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centres,” said Acacio Cruz, the Gmail Site Reliability Manager. “This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data centre.
“Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data centre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data centre to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control,” said Cruz.
Though the company didn’t specify numbers, it did say that only a “small subset” of users had been affected. Cruz also pointed out that Google’s own internal email system was affected.
“We know how painful an outage like this is - we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future,” he said.
However, and somewhat ironically, Google Mail suffered another problem that stopped users accessing their Inboxes for a second time in early May on the same day as Kasia Chmielinski, a Google employee working on Google Mail and Google Docs, was due to take part in a live discussion on the Web User site.
Chmielinski reiterated how seriously Google took such problems. “Regardless of their origins, we take these disruptions very seriously - we have an average of only 10-15 minutes of downtime per month,” she said.
