Google offers explanation and apology for Monday's Gmail issues

Google has now offered both an explanation and an apology for issues that affected many of its Gmail users for much of the day on Monday, claiming the problems were due to a "dual network failure."

Many users of Gmail were a bit frustrated on Monday as they were not getting their emails as fast as they normally would. In some case, emails with attachments were arriving in Gmail inboxes without them. The issues lasted for about 11 hours.

Today, Google posted an apology on their Gmail blog, stating, " ... we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver." It also offered an explanation for the problems, saying:

The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. The two network failures were unrelated, but in combination they reduced Gmail’s capacity to deliver messages to users, and beginning at 5:54 a.m. PST messages started piling up.

Google said their Gmail team worked through much of the day on Monday to restore the network back to its full capacity and by 4 pm Pacific Time the backlog of emails had been cleared. Google said that 29 percent of Gmail users experienced just a 2.6 second delay on average in getting their emails. However, about 1.5 percent of Gmail users had their mail delayed to their inboxes by over two hours.

Google says they will take steps to make sure these kinds of issues don't happen again, including adding more network capacity, putting in better backup features and other changes that will keep emails flowing on Gmail in the event of another network failure.

Source: Google | Image via Google