As many of you may have noticed yesterday, Gmail was either down or was very unresponsive for the majority of the day. Many people and more importantly, businesses, rely on Gmail for their email needs and given Google’s track record of nearly 100%, this came as a rather big surprise.

According to the official Gmail blog, it was an unforeseen issue. Similar to Glacier-Digital’s web hosting network, Google’s mail service has many, many overlapping servers which allow for one of the servers to receive maintenance, with no interrupt in service whatsoever. The problem occurred not on Google’s mail servers, but on the request servers which decide where the thousands of mail requests go. I received reports from colleagues having issues throughout the entire day, not Google’s reported “100 minutes”.

Users of Gmail through POP3/IMAP, for instance on Outlook or Thunderbird would not have noticed any interruption, since they were not accessing these request servers.

Google isn’t invincible after all! I for one, can forgive them, however it remains to be seen how many others will.