The Protocol For 9/1/09: The Reason Why G-Mail Failed
No, it wasn't because Glenn Beck was writing a crazy email to ACORN shockingly. It was because of over capacity. Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage Tuesday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late Tuesday. According to Google, the problem began when it took several Gmail servers offline for maintenance, a routine procedure that normally is transparent to users. However, the twist this time around was that Google had made some changes to the routers that direct Gmail traffic to servers in hopes of improving reliability, and those changes backfired. "As we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers -- servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response," Google said in a post to its Gmail blog late Tuesday. "At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific a few of the request router...