GMail outage of 09-01-09
Gmail’s reliability honcho jumped on the webmail’s official blog last night to explain what happened during yesterday’s outages.
So? What happened? In a nutshell, it appears they brought down some servers for maintenance on Tuesday morning (Pacific time) and expected the webapp’s “request” routers to handle all the re-directs to valid servers. Which makes sense. But they were unpleasantly surprised, when the re-directs couldn’t handle the traffic and GMail ground to a halt. Meanwhile over at Twitter their lines were burning up with everyone Tweeting about the GMail outage.
The Gmail team notes that IMAP/POP worked throughout the outages, and that they’re working on a fix for similar problems in the future.
Which is good news for those of us who have put more and more of our faith into Google Apps like GMail, Google docs, etc. Personally, I route all of my emails through my GMail account. Did yesterday’s outage make me re-think this decision? For a nano second, then it was back to work.
How did you handle this outage?
