Google has apologized for Monday’s network issue that delayed incoming email messages for millions of users, undoubtedly causing frustration and stress for those who rely on the Gmail service.
In an official Gmail blog post written today, Google said they first noticed a “dual network failure” at 5:54 A.M. PST on Monday, which is a “very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time.”
The issue only affected a small portion users at the time, but by 11 A.M., Google’s App Status page noted that “less than 50 percent” were seeing delays and download fails for attachments.
By 4 P.M., Google fixed the problem, which affected 29 percent of Gmail messages. Google said that the average delivery delay was only 2.6 seconds, but that 1.5 percent of messages — including many of mine — were delayed for more than two hours.
The search giant pledged to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
“We’re taking steps to ensure that there is sufficient network capacity, including backup capacity for Gmail, even in the event of a rare dual network failure,” Google wrote. “We also plan to make changes to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to a network capacity shortfall in the unlikely event that one occurs in the future.”
