Gmail Outage was an Internal Bug Error, Not a Cyber Attack

Google has apologized for problems that most Google users experienced on Friday to services like Gmail, Google+, Google Docs and Calendar that lasted for approximately 25 minutes.

Ben Treynor, Vice President of engineering wrote in a company blog post, "Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies-we strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today."

According to Treynor, at 10:55 a.m. PST, an internal system encountered a software bug which generated an incorrect configuration. This error prevented many users to gain access to the various services for about 15 minutes. Engineers were able to generate a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and some users were then able to gain some access while others were still having some trouble. By 11:30 a.m., a correct configuration was generated and most of the users were able to log in.

While services are now back to normal, Google is now focused on getting rid of the source of errors that caused the service outage earlier today and to come up with a quick recovery process when a problem similar to this does take place.

Treynor also announced the next steps that the company plans to do on the next few days to prevent outage like this from recurring. The engineers will be inspecting other configuration systems to ensure a similar bug will not affect the system again. They will also be doing additional checks to make detection and diagnosis faster should a bug appear again.

Meanwhile, this announcement will surely be a relief for Hotmail user David S. Peck who might be the biggest casualty of this outage. He reportedly received thousands of emails from Gmail users on his Hotmail account.

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