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Gfail: Gmail Goes Down for Nearly 2 Hours
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It was a rough Tuesday afternoon for Gmail users as the service experienced problems that lasted nearly two hours.
Google yesterday evening took to its Gmail Blog to talk about what the company dubbed a "Big Deal." Detailing that the outage was because of a miscalculation of capacity, Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar, wrote that the company had already thoroughly investigated what happened, and was compiling a list of things it intended to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
It's nice to know the team has things under control, but what actually went wrong? Treynor says that yesterday morning the team took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades, a procedure that normally goes off without a hitch. Ben continued on to explain that this time the team underestimated the load that some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers. At approximately 12:30, a few of the request routers became overloaded and so, the load was transferred onto the remaining request routers. More became overloaded and it sort of went from there until they were all down.
Steps Google is taking to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again include increasing request router capacity, and figuring out a way to make sure problems in datacenter A don't affect datacenter B.
How many of you were unable to access your Gmail yesterday? Let us know in the comments below how you dealt with the outage!
Source : Tom's Hardware US
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Alan: What do you think about future approaches to security such as a dumb terminal approach (i.e. Citrix or VNC in a world with infinitely fast bandwidth and infinitely small latency)? Dino: I think we are moving towards a Web-based thin-terminal world, whether we like it or not. Once consumers realize that when their data is stored in the cloud, that they never have to worry about losing it, then they will begin to prefer it. If providers give users enough options such that they believe that they are as in control of their data as they are on their own system, they will have faith in it. This means allowing users to encrypt their data so that even the provider cannot see the file names or their contents. Alan: That’s the thing though, is it a better solution? I’ll be the first to admit that I use Gmail because it’s so convenient to have “email anywhere.” With that said, I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve emailed via Gmail that I probably wouldn’t want anyone else to read. I assume Gmail has redundant storage, but what happens if their hard drives crash, or my Internet is dead? If I was a hacker, wouldn’t it always makes more sense to try to exploit Gmail (and get millions of credit card numbers) as opposed to my own personal computer and get one person’s financial info? Once the world moves to SSD, I’d predict that an individual user would have similar levels of reliability. Plus any sort of encryption Google could do, an individual could do on his home system (if not better encryption given that he’d be able to dedicate CPU resources toward a single user). Do you encrypt everything on your personal desktops and notebooks? Dino: I’m also a huge fan of SSDs. I love their silent, fast, and reliable operation. As for data confidentiality, I use full-disk encryption and power down as often as is conveniently possible. The existing attacks against FDE require access to a powered-on or very recently powered-off system. Alan: What about secure hypervisors? Dino: So far, secure hypervisors have been used to protect the hardware business model from the users and owners of those systems. Systems such as video game consoles use secure hypervisors to prevent the owner from tampering with it. I would love to see software manufacturers provide a secure hypervisor to protect my data. Alan: As would I, provided it was developed by a talented company and was reasonably priced. In the 90's, security researchers had to deal with the threat of polymorphic viruses which could elude many signature-based anti virus tools. What do you think the challenges in the next 2 years will be? Dino: Signature-based anti-virus is an optimization that we have confused for a solution. The challenge over the next few years will be developing and deploying systems that are able to detect and prevent unknown exploits and malware. The highly profitable business model of signature-based anti-virus subscriptions discourages those companies from developing better and more generic solutions to the problem. That, however, leaves room for start-ups to innovate in this space.
Only the web interface was down. Gmail worked fine via POP throughout the "outage."
It didn't affect me. I would like to add that I hardly ever have service issues with GMail. Kudos to them for addressing the problem and being open about it, and for excellent FREE service.
It affected me as far as accessing the web site but POP worked fine. Google still rocks for getting it back up so fast. Keep doing your thing Google!
I lost access to the GMail website entirely, but my phone could still synch through POP3 just fine.
^ same here. Didn'T notice. However, time here is -4 EDT
Not a big deal to me since I don't need to check my Gmail account every hour like some people. Good to see they are working to make it more reliable though.
I've seen hotmail / msn messenger go down for longer than this without any explanation offered at all. one would expect that google would have issues from time to time as well. anyone arguing that microsoft is benefitting from this needs to really rethink what they are saying. i've already seen cnet try to say that microsoft was happy about this. i really doubt microsoft would have an opinion on the matter that would bolster their own product. just kind of shows how many hacks there are that claim to be in the IT field.
That's the price of free. If it's free, you can never get less than you pay for.
Is it me or does Google seem to have quite a few outages recently? IIRC there was one in June?
I tried accessing it when it was down and it frustrated me for a bit then I just went about my day and did something else. Hopefully it doesn't happen again but 2 hours without email didn't kill me yesterday.
people can live w/o email for two hours... it wasn't that big of a deal.
I guess it was not quite ready to come out of beta.
It doesn't make it a "Gfail" - sheesh.
I really thought that Google's server infrastructure made of thousands cheap and redundant servers could never fail ... guess I was wrong.
So I'm a huge gmail fan. Best email out there in my opinion. Everyone at my company basically uses it (for it's chat aspect) and it archives everything automatically in a super efficient search. All that being said....it's reliability has been truly horrible lately. I only know this because I use it all day at work, and when it goes down suddenly im out of the communication loop. It happens pretty often too...like once a month. I'd never know if it happens with other emails because I don't sit on them 9 hours a day....but yeah, it's getting annoying.
at least they didn't try to pull an apple and tell their users to stay silent
Google makes gazillions of dollars off of their 'free' service with their ad space. If you think about it, it's not free, your simply giving them space in your brain. Meh, I wasn't using it. That being said, I love Google and their excellent services. Quality, innovative products at the cost of a fairly unobtrusive ads, they've got my vote. 2 hours is a hiccup, not an outage.
jesus bif rikin deal. Whats all this hype about a 2 hour downtime. i guess some ppl cant live without e-amil these days, geeeeshhh
Oh wow, I see what they did there. You see, "Gfail" rhymes with "Gmail" and is therefore witty.
I was using the web interface and it affected me. I was quite surprised that it was down. Maybe they should have kept the beta tag a little longer after all.
Gfail not the suitable word anyway
I had use Gmail and i will continue use it because it fast secure and has strong Spam filter
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Will someone tell S. Palin about this.. before she thinks her gmail account got hacked too!!
Could not send email from the GMail Blackberry app either.
Past couple of days I would have to refresh my gmail more then once because It would freeze or not show me all my email's, Google better do something before they start losing users interest in it.
Do people soon forget when Windows Live Mail (Hotmail Ajax) first launched its beta that it did not work with IE6 for a week. That is a fail in my book because it was not an outage.
i didn't even know it was down until i read this article, but i'm not a heavy gmail user, i just leave it open in a tab all day and wait for a notifier to tell me a i have an a new gmail message
absolutely ridiculous rookie mistake. I don't know how they stay in business with only a 99.9999% up-time rate.
2 hours? who cares.
Only the web interface was down. Gmail worked fine via POP throughout the "outage."
So did IMAP.
6 hours.
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&ddo=1&hl=en
99.93% uptime in case people want to know.
I don't use GMail very often. It's my "this site looks like I might get spam by signing up for an account" email.