“We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service,” Ben Treynor, Google’s “Site Reliability Czar,” said in a blog post.<\/p>\n
“I’d like to apologize to all of you,” Treynor said, adding that the 100-minute Gmail breakdown was “a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such.”<\/p>\n
Treynor said Google had taken a “small fraction” of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades but “slightly underestimated the load” that placed on other servers, which became overloaded.<\/p>\n
“As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the Web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server,” said Treynor, a vice president of engineering.<\/p>\n
“We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again,” he added.<\/p>\n
“Gmail remains more than 99.9 percent available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity,” he said.<\/p>\n
Google’s last major technical problem occurred in May, leaving millions of people unable to use popular services such as its main search page, as well as Gmail and Google News.<\/p>\n
The hour-long outage affected Web surfers not only in the United States but in other countries and numerous other services including Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Analytics and video-sharing site YouTube.<\/p>\n
Google also experienced a breakdown of Gmail, which has tens of millions of users, in February which lasted a few hours.<\/p>\n
The failures, while rare, are seen by some industry analysts as a setback to the Mountain View, California-based Google’s efforts to promote Gmail and other Web-based services to businesses.<\/p>\n