Google has apologised for the
two
and a half hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause
was down to datacentre maintenance.
"Lots of people around the world who rely on
Gmail were
disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we are very sorry. We did
everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now
resolved," said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a
blog
post.
Google had been testing new code designed to keep data geographically closer
to its owner, which brought about disruption when maintenance in one datacentre
caused another facility to be overloaded. This had a cascade effect, according
to Google, and it took the company an hour to get it back under control.
"We know how painful an outage like this is. We run Google on Gmail, so
outages like this affect us the same way they affect you," Cruz said.
In order to compensate customers for any lost business due to the outage,
reports say that Google will offer 15 days of free service to businesses and
organisations that pay for the email service.
The Gmail outage was not the only problem Google experienced on Tuesday. A
phishing scam attacked the search firm's
Google
Talk chat service. Users were asked to "check out this video" by clicking on
a link, but the URL directed users to a web site called ViddyHo which asked for
Gmail usernames and passwords.
The scammers sending the links have now been blocked, and Google has
blacklisted the ViddyHo site. Google Talk now carries a warning to users that
entering any information on the page may result in identity theft or other
fraud.
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