Tech & Biz

Gmail Back Online after Outage

by Jordan Yerman | February 24, 2009 at 06:57 am

159 views | 15 Recommendations | 1 comment

Update: Yesterday's Gmail outage is blamed on a failure at a European data center following routine server maintenance.

Update (3:49 pm): Lots of folks are asking what happened, so we thought you'd like an explanation. This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

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.

Gmail is back online, following an earlier outage. Users across the web freaked out as their one-stop communications source was temporarily unavailable, which challenged two tacitly accepted notions:

1. Google is perfect and infallible
2. Centralizing all of your web tools is a good thing

The outage, and steps taken to correct it, were confirmed on Google's blog.

502 is an unpleasant number... almost as bad as 404.

Trying to open Gmail will currently result in a “502 Server Error: The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.” Other Google services, such as Search, Reader, etc., are working fine.

There’s no official word from Google about the outage yet. As always, I feel uneasy; I rely on Gmail, and any prolonged outage is affecting my work and making me think about Google not being as bulletproof as most people usually think it is.

Panic not, readers! It's not you, it's Gmail. It's broken, and apparently, it's due to 'a fault', which is reassuring.

We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.