Many of you may have noticed outages or issues with several Google services yesterday, but none were hit as hard as Gmail. Google acknowledged yesterday on its app status dashboard that Gmail was experiencing complete outages or at least service delays for most of the day, and has taken to its official blog today to explain what happened.
According to its post, an extremely rare "dual network failure" knocked out separate redundant paths, taking down Gmail's capacity starting at about 6am PST yesterday. Although engineers were made aware of the outage right as it happened, it took most of the day to clear up the issue and mail didn't start flowing at a regular pace until about 4pm PST.
Google says that 71 percent of messages delivered during the period were unaffected, and across the other 29 percent that were hit by the outage the average delivery delay was a mere 2.6 seconds. Naturally some of us noticed delays much longer than this, and Google does say that roughly 1.5 percent of mail was delayed over two hours.
Just as we would expect, the Gmail team apologized profusely for the delays and downtime yesterday, saying that they want to ensure "that Gmail users get the experience they expect." The plan is to make Gmail delivery more resilient, even in network failure situations by adding extra backup capacity and reviewing internal policies for dealing with a rare failure such as this.
Just in case you were worried, this small outage didn't drop Gmail below its beloved 99.9 percent uptime.
Source: Official Gmail Blog
Have you listened to this week's Android Central Podcast?
Every week, the Android Central Podcast brings you the latest tech news, analysis and hot takes, with familiar co-hosts and special guests.
We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.
There are so many Alexa speakers so let us help you decide which to buy
Whether you buy an Amazon-branded Echo smart speaker or something from a third party like Sonos or Eufy, there are a lot of great Alexa speakers to choose from. That's why we're here to break down your options for you to help you make the best purchase decision.
Did you pre-order the Google Pixel 5?
The Google Pixel 5 has arrived in all of its official glory. Now that we know how much the phone costs and what specs it's packing, did you get your pre-order in?
Review: The HP x360 14c is not just a good Chromebook, it's a good laptop
Chromebook fans who are looking for the perfect balance of form, function, and fun have several great devices to choose from in late 2020. HP just put the others on notice that the Chromebook x360 14c is officially part of that exclusive club.
These are the best cases for your brand new Pixel 4a 5G!
The Pixel 4a 5G looks boring in Just Black, but we can fix that! These cases are fun, fashionable, functional, and ready to carry your Pixel 4a 5G into the future.