Google's Gmail Outage Update

The Gmail outage that took place yesterday and was back online a couple hours later was caused by some new code that Google engineers were installing during routine maintenance at their European data centers. During these routine maintenance's, no outage or problems are usually caused but this time that was not the case.

"Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.". Google said in its blog. "The bugs have been found and fixed, and we're in the process of pushing out changes. 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."

Google is also handing out 15 days of free service to businesses, government agencies, and anyone else who pays for premium Google services. The 15 day's free is valued at $2.05 per user, well more than the SLA. Under the SLA, Google was only to have given 3 days free service but decided to give 15, I assume for the embarrassment the outage has caused the always online company.