The outage started around noon yesterday and continued well into the afternoon. Different regions experienced different levels of outage while the tagline “GFail” spread across social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Gmail recently surpassed AOL to become the third-largest webmail service in the United States.
After the tech giant got the problem under control, Google engineering VP Ben Treynor released a statement on the company’s official blog that blamed the outage on some bad planning.
“At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system ‘stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow,’” he said. “This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server.”
Enterprising users found a way around it by using different email programs or devices, like iPhones and BlackBerries, to access their email. According to Treynor, anyone who checked their email using IMAP/POP access. Neither of those two Internet protocols used the disabled routers involved in the outage.
The outage drew criticism from many quarters of the online punditry.
“Gmail … is obviously having some growing pains,” said tech analyst Erick Schonfeld. “A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.”