Google has revealed that Gmail’s two outages last week were due to “an atypical pattern of email traffic.”
According to Google’s incident report, the tech giant runs a core message processing system that is responsible for delivering, monitoring, queuing, and receiving email messages.
“The root cause of both incidents was an atypical pattern of email traffic, resulting in high resource utilization in this system and delays in email delivery,” Google said in an update.
The company plans to “implement rate limit mechanisms in our systems” to improve things going forward.
Gmail’s core message processing system experienced delays for email delivery on November 30 and December 1 for a cumulative duration of 6 hours and 23 minutes.
“To our Gmail customers whose email delivery was impacted during this disruption, we sincerely apologize. This is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to offer you, and we are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability,” said the company.
On both occasions, Google engineers were alerted to the delays via monitoring alerts.
“We immediately began mitigation efforts, including increasing capacity for the impacted regions. We have also implemented reasonable limits to prevent such an atypical traffic pattern from recurring,” said Google.
To stop such outages from happening again, Google is implement rate limit mechanisms in its systems.
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