What Google has to say about Gmail’s recent global outage

Gmail

Gmail, the world's most popular email client, and Google Drive experienced a widespread global outage earlier today, impacting millions of users for several hours. Google has since resolved the issues and restored full functionality to both services, as confirmed by the Google Status Dashboard. The company has released an official incident report detailing the cause of the outage.

What caused the outage
Google had published the “Incident Report’ on its official status portal. According to that, the outage earlier today affected both Gmail and Google Drive for 4 hours 10 minutes. The tech giant has confirmed that the root cause of the outage was “latent misconfiguration of our lock-service infrastructure”. This impacted a critical storage layer during a high-load scenario.

Google has further confirmed that it will also publish a full Incident report with more details on the outage of Gmail and Google Drive.

How users were impacted
As per the incident report, Gmail users faced issues with the attachment feature. The issue primarily affected users trying to send emails or save drafts containing attachments where users were unable to send emails or save drafts with attachments. However, sending emails without attachments was unaffected during the outage.

Google Drive users, on the other hand, faced issues while uploading on the cloud storage.

When did it all started
According to the status portal, the outage started around August 9, 12:45 am and continued till 5:00 am. The entire outage lasted for around 4 hours 10 minutes before Google fixed the issues with both services at around 5:00 am.