All right, I am quite sure that many folks out there who are also Gmail users ran into issues with the online email service yesterday (which we also reported on), and even until today, there has been a fair number of Gmail users who woke up to a rather unpleasant surprise – that some of their Gmail messages were arriving at a slow pace that they were not used to, with certain attachments not making the cut, either. Google has apologized, saying, “We’d like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver. We have analyzed what happened, and we’ll tell you about it below. In addition, we’re taking several steps to prevent a recurrence.”
Basically, the cause of the message delivery delays happened to be attributed to a dual network failure, which is a rather rare event as a couple of different, redundant network paths actually fail to work simultaneously. While these two network failures happen to be unrelated, being down in tandem had actually resulted in a reduced capacity for Gmail to deliver messages to users. Needless to say, from 5:54 a.m. PST onward, messages started to pile up and Google’s automated monitoring alerted the Gmail engineering team within minutes, so an investigation into the matter was launched. Were you or your business affected by this slowdown? [Press Release]