Google suffered major outage over the weekend, downing Gmail, Google+, Calendar, and Documents. As expected, users around the world were outraged, leading into hashtags on Twitter and not-so-happy status updates on Facebook.
The company has released an apology Friday evening, saying an internal software bug caused the Gmail outage, wherein users’ data requests were ignored. It also lead to errors within other Google services.
“An internal system that generates configurations — essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave — encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration,” Google’s VP of Engineering Ben Treynor said on the company’s blog. “The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors.”
Google adds they are in the process of establishing systems to prevent any similar problems in the future.
The Gmail outage, which began Friday at 10:55 a.m. PST, lasted between 25 and 55 minutes. It affected as much as 10% of its total users.
Source: Mashable
