Google encountered a service blackout on Friday when around 42 million users were disconnected from its services for up to an hour. The search engine giant’s Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents services were mainly affected from the midnight glitch.
Ben Traynor, VP of Engineering Google, in a blog post, admitted that the downtime was caused due to an internal software bug.
Traynor mentioned that “At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations — essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave — encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration.”
“The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors.”
It was when the system responsible for the malfunction automatically started generating a new correct configuration and started sending it throughout Google’s live services, eventually clearing up the errors.
Offering an apology for the downtime, Google has vowed not to take such incidents lightly and try to avoid such issues in future. Google revealed that they are incorporating new checks to ensure that such problems do not crop up again.
Google’s Gmail also faced another issue wherein a ‘technical glitch’ led to a hotmail user being bombarded with thousands of unwanted emails. The bug, which led to auto-fill of e-mail address in Gmail, affected the David S. Peck’s Hotmail account. The company spokesman has confirmed that the bug had been fixed.
