Tuesday’s Gmail outage broader than originally belived

Life

19 April 2012

Google underestimated the scope and consequences of the outage that hit Gmail on Tuesday.

In its latest update about the problem, Google said that the hour-plus-long outage affected "less than 10%" of Gmail’s user base, much more than the original estimate of "less than 2%."

Moreover, in that update posted at around 9:45pm US Eastern Time, Google also warned about possible lingering effects stemming from the outage.

"While we have resolved this issue with Google Mail, it’s possible that some users may experience message delays because affected accounts weren’t available to receive messages. The messages will be successfully delivered after account access is restored," the note in the Google Apps Status Dashboard reads.

Assuming that 9.5% of Gmail users were affected, that would mean that the problem hit about 33.2 million people. Gmail has more than 350 million active users.

"What this Gmail outage underscores is the massive reach of public portal email. While the vendor might blithely say – ‘oh, only 2% of our users are affected’ – the reality is that the small percentage translates to millions of customers being left without service," said Gartner analyst Matthew Cain via e-mail.

Google first acknowledged the problem at about 12:40pm (EST) on Tuesday, and said it had been resolved at around 1:45pm.

In the Apps Status Dashboard notes, Google also apologised "for the inconvenience," thanked Gmail users for their "patience and continued support" and said that it is continually making improvements to its "system reliability," which the company considers "a top priority."

Gmail is used by individuals for personal matters and by companies for employee communications as part of the Google Apps cloud-hosted collaboration and communication suite.

IDG News Service

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