Google suffers global mail outage

So it can happen to the best of us. Earlier this month, Google reminded businesses everywhere of the perils of inadequate system maintenance planning.

Gmail, the online email service from Google, suffered an outage of almost two hours earlier this month when some routine hardware maintenance went wrong. From private individuals to business accounts, every user of this web interface across the planet was affected.

In a blog, Ben Treynor, Vice President of Engineering and Site Reliability, explained: "we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem - we do this all the time and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline."

But Google had underestimated the load placed on the request routers - devices which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for a response. Soon some of these routers became overloaded and stopped accepting inbound requests. As traffic was passed across to other routers - already working at capacity - the system quickly became saturated.

Throughout the period of downtime which ensured only IMAP/POP access remained so users collecting their messages via Outlook or any other email client would have been unaffected.

No differentiation between private and business email

This outage again raises the question over the lack of differentiation between Gmail accounts for individuals and business users. Google has always made clear its policy of offering the same services to all account holders via the same infrastructure but this does mean the slightest problem will affect all users equally. Some analysts judge this to be a mistake and have advocated the segmentation of private and business traffic, a practice which is common amongst other SaaS providers.