Gmail Gfail Update
August 12, 2008
An estimated 20 million Gmail users received 502 errors upon login on August 11, causing a huge furor. Both personal and hosted apps accounts were affected. People in the United States, Canada, and India reported the problem and even a Google employee said the company’s corporate e-mail account was down. (You may want to read our earlier, opinionated post here. Google News’s own run down of stories is here but may be gone soon as well. Click quick.)
Google posted a comment about the August 11, 2008, outage: “Since about 2 p.m. Pacific Time today, many Gmail users have been unable to access their email. We are very sorry for this interruption in service. The issue is being caused by a temporary outage in the contacts system used by Gmail which is preventing Gmail from loading properly. We are starting to roll out a fix now and hope to have the problem resolved as quickly as possible. Even though you may not be able to get to your inbox right now, your mail is safe, including new incoming messages.”
The first help discussion post from the Gmail Guide team at 5:31 p.m. At 7:35 p.m., Gmail Guide stated all accounts should be accessible. Although a bit slow on the uptake, Gmail communicated as it went along, which surprised many armchair and credentialed commentators. 502 errors appear to be a fairly regular occurrence, looking at the discussion group notifications at http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Announcements-and-Alerts-en/topics.
Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson actually posted an apology on the official Gmail blog, giving a tiny explanation of the problem: “The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly.” Translation: Address books are mucking up the works. He also said: “We’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.” Translation: We hear the several million people screaming at us.
A long, technical explanation wasn’t issued. But just so you have an idea about where the problem occurred: the Contacts data is based on an API that ties contact to your entire account, not just Gmail. With the API you can “synchronize Google contacts with contacts on a mobile device, maintain relationships between people in social applications (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), give users the ability to communicate directly with their friends from external applications using phone, email, and IM.”
So that Contacts function has its Googley-tendrils extending into complex places. Maybe it’s like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and this particular tentacle just got squished?
Jessica Bratcher, August 12, 2008
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[…] ScottGu An estimated 20 million Gmail users received 502 errors upon login on August 11, causing a huge furor. Both personal and hosted apps accounts were affected. People in the United States, Canada, and India reported the problem and even a Google employee said the company’s corporate e-mail account was down. … […]