The Day Gmail Stood Still: A Tale of Horror

Techwriter10 3 Tallied Votes 888 Views Share

A week ago today, the unthinkable happened. That's right, Gmail went down...for *two* hours. You would have thought, judging from the amount of chatter on Twitter that we were experiencing an epic attack, a horrible natural disaster, perhaps the end of life as we know it; but it was none of that. Just couldn't get our email for a couple of hours. I'm surprised the Obama administration didn't step in and declare a State of Emergency. It certainly seemed plausible based on the reaction to the outage.

My favorite tweet, which captured perfectly, the level of hysteria we were seeing on Twitter as people learned Gmail wasn't working, was this one:

@scalzi: MIN 30 OF GMAIL OUTAGE THE CITIES ARE IN FLAMES & PEOPLE EATING PETS TO SURVIVE.TO FUTURE GENERATIONS: WE MEANT WELL

What Went Terribly Wrong

The funny thing is that this was not a denial of service attack. It wasn't a North Korean hacker trying to bring the west to its knees by disrupting this most vital of services. No, it was good old fashioned human error. I know it's hard to believe that with all of the super smart people at Google that it's possible that one (or maybe a few of them) screwed up, but apparently that's what happened.

The Official Google Gmail Blog post on the outage described the cause this way:

"... At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded."

What it Really Means

That approximately 80 percent of my tweets for 90 minutes involved this outage--so much traffic in fact, that ironically it could have taken down Twitter with it--tells you the extent to which people depend on this service. In spite of the fact that for most of us, Google's services are provided free of charge, we still go ballistic when it goes down. (Those who pay for it have a bigger gripe, but I'm willing to bet that's a small percentage of the people who were complaining.)

But regardless of whether you pay for Google services or not, the reaction (some might say overreaction) shows we have become dangerously dependent on them. We expect our services to be up all the time, and when they are not, we get REALLY upset. And when the collective web gets upset at the same time in the age of social computing, it can get ugly in a hurry.

What Should We Do?

We have to remember that computers are fallible. Networks are fallible and so is the genius of Google. Sure, Google has to put more contingencies in place, and test them regularly to make sure they work and this doesn't happen very often in the future. But we also have to realize that chances are, it will, and we have to learn to accept that. You have to ask yourself, how often do key applications go down inside the enterprise. How often do you experience issues on your internal networks?

These things happen when you're dealing with technology, so let's make a deal that the next time that Google goes down for a short time, maybe we don't have to discuss it ad nauseum on Twitter. Instead, perhaps we can all relax and enjoy the moment, maybe call a friend, go for a walk, spend time with family or send an email. Check that last one.

minigweek commented: Nice way of presenting the dependancy on web services!! Liked it! +3
quicktpgo 0 Junior Poster

As concerned to Gmail, I have a problem, one of my gmail account has to be reset password everytime I log in.
I can't give it up casue it is one of my important mail having lot of important info!

minigweek 40 Junior Poster in Training

Agree with you 100% there Ron. Good Post, I liked.

Techwriter10 42 Practically a Posting Shark

quicktpgo: That is odd behavior. I've never heard of that happening with a Gmail account, but I don't doubt that it does. Wonder if there is a way to reset the account or export your Gmail from one account to another.

Good luck.

Ron

Techwriter10 42 Practically a Posting Shark

Thanks minigweek. Glad you liked the post and appreciate you taking the time to comment.

Ron

Anarionist 1 Junior Poster in Training

quicktpgo: i have the same problem and i also learned that the chat function won't work anymore.

InsightsDigital 57 Posting Virtuoso

Even ten years ago, the majority of people did not have email and people lived fine for years. Now in this connected age, people expect to be connected - it is this expectation that minor GMAIL snafus are perceived as major disasters.

Anarionist 1 Junior Poster in Training

haha yeah if twitter, youtube or facebook went down people would mass riot. if i had many of the old school systems i would just play them who needs twitter or facebook. Youtube has some good stuff but i can get along with out any of it. we are too dependent on technology already example: if we lost power all over the country just for a couple of hours we would be lost. tech is great but for me i love tech (minus texting and all the other trend stuff that teens are doing which is annoying) but i can go outstide and play around or read a book.

seomasterz 0 Newbie Poster

i am also agree with you.http://www.faizitech.com

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