Posts Tagged ‘outage’
Gmail outage hits ‘small subset of users’
September 24th, 2009 | 
Author: Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a “small subset of users,” the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.
On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.
Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.
Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive to improve reliability. One company spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said on Twitter, “Gmail down (for Googlers too).”
Google had Gmail outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.
Gmail was working for me Thursday morning, but slowly and without access to my contacts at 8 a.m. PDT. By 8:13 a.m., it was behaving properly.
Updated 9:15 a.m. PDT – Many users are reporting that their e-mail is back to normal, but there are still problems with Gmail contacts. Google posted the following advisory at 8:29 a.m. PDT.
“The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com.”
The Google Apps status dashboard flagged the Gmail problem Thursday morning.
Posted in 
Tags: 
CNET News Daily Podcast: Why the Gmail outage matters
CNET News reporter Tom Krazit joins today’s podcast to talk about what caused Tuesday’s Gmail outage and what it means as we move more of our businesses and personal lives into the cloud. Also in today’s podcast: Oracle’s acquisition of Sun could be delayed by an antitrust inquiry by the European Commission, Sony unveils a new smartphone and Netbook in Berlin, and more.
Listen now: Download today’s podcast
Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-11424_3-10336483-90.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
More on today’s Gmail issue
Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm 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!”. 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. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html
Gmail users suffer through outage
Gmail went offline Tuesday for some users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Gmail users were unable to get to their accounts on Monday as an outage struck the Google e-mail service.
“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail,” Google said at 11:12 a.m. PDT on its Google Apps status dashboard after it discovered the error.
At 11:28 a.m., some good news arrived: “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future.”
However, two hours later, the problems persisted for some, and the Twittersphere was abuzz with griping.
The problems appeared to affect the Web-based version of the service, but accounts could be reached using third-party e-mail software that used the IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, interface.
Gmail is used by tens of millions of people, and its fast growth carried it past AOL’s e-mail service into third place, according to ComScore.
Google didn’t immediately comment on the scope and cause of the outage. It’s not the first Gmail outage this year.
Google Apps customers, who pay $50 per user per year, get extensions of their service contracts, if their services are down for longer than a certain duration. The dashboard showed only mail to have troubles, not other Google Apps services, such as Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs.
Outages pose problems for Google, as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues that its service availability is competitive with most organizations’ abilities to run their own e-mail servers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10323306-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
