Google has apologised for the interruption in services experienced by users on Friday, saying the company had “missed the mark”.
The problem affected users trying to access Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents for approximately 25 minutes.
“Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies,” said Ben Treynor, Google’s vice president of engineering, on Friday.
“At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations — essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave — encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors.”
He said the problem persisted for as long as 30 minutes for 10 per cent of users.
Social media platforms were awash with queries and complaints from Google customers worldwide.
The company said it was planning on installing more monitoring protocols in order to detect and rectify problems quickly and effectively.
“The issue has been resolved, and we’re now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn’t happen again,” said Treynor.
Yahoo! responded to the outage by tweeting “Gmail is temporarily unavailable”, followed by a screenshot of the Google error page.
However the rival company apologised for the Tweet, saying: “Earlier today, a Tweet that reflected bad judgement was posted and has been deleted. We apologise to @Google and the @Gmail team.”
