Google Says It's Sorry For Outage, Hands Out Credit
Google said that at 1:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, its monitoring systems detected that global Gmail consumer and businesses accounts were not able to access e-mail.
The two-and-a-half hour downtime primarily affected subscribers of Google's Premier Edition, which is aimed at businesses and provides Google Apps, including Gmail, for $50 per user account annually.
"The service disruption lasted a few hours, which entitles Google Apps Premier customers to a three-day service credit," a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. "Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill, we are going above the SLA [service level agreement] and extending the full credit, which is 15 days."
The SLA "guarantees" that Google Apps is available at least 99.9 percent of the time "so your employees are more productive and so you can worry less about system downtime."
While users in the U.S. and U.K. who have Gmail offline through Gmail Labs were able to access their inbox Tuesday, they were unable to send or receive e-mails, the company said. In a Google blog, Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager, said the problem was traced to a glitch in routine maintenance performed in one of the company's European data centers. There is usually no disruption to the service since accounts are served out of another data center, he said.
"[There were] unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner that caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another," according to Cruz.