Gmail's upgrade activity results in global crash

This came forward more than astonishment on the internet giant Google’s part. Tuesday morning (Pacific Time), Google’s web mailing service –Gmail crashed for duration of around 100 minutes globally resulting in widespread panic among the people who rely on Gmail for all their personal and professional communications. At the same time it caused a great deal of confusion among the Google Engineers to figure out the cause of the outage.

The affect:
The crash affected around millions of trusted Gmail users who depend on the web interface and its Apps to do most of their professional tasks. The result: we saw people tweeting each other expressing their concern and anger. Users from some states of US, Italy, Germany, France and Taiwan reported being unable to access Gmail in the Google forum.

Earlier outages
Well, this isn’t the first time Google’s Gmail has went offline. Earlier the mailing service has suffered outages in February and previously in April, August and October 2008. Gmail has been offline for more than two and an hour on some occasions and even for 30 hours in one such circumstance. During a breakdown in May Gmail was tagged as ‘#googlefail’ on Twitter.

Gmail’s clarification:
While explaining the cause of crash, Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar writes in the official Gmail blog: “…we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers’ offline to perform routine upgrades, we do this all the time.” With this upgrade activity going on one side, at about 12:30 pm Pacific some of the request routers became overloaded and stopped responding. The load was transferred to the remaining request routers which eventually resulted in a crash. “As a result people were not able to 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 router, “he adds. Treynor explains that the downlink was caused by a miscalculation. Future Course: Google hasn’t taken it as a light issue and is working to rectify the errors to avoid any future appearances of the similar situation. Treynor remarked, “Today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such.” Gmail says that it remains more than 99.9% available to all users; for us the future has the answers –whether Gmail would be facing anymore crashes or not!