Google has apologized for the Gmail outage that affected its services on Friday, as has Yahoo for its Twitter post that berated and poked fun at Google.
On Friday, January 24, users who tried to log in to Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents were unable to access the services for nearly 25 minutes. A handful of users experienced the issues for more than 30 minutes, thanks to the outage. Nearly 42 million users were disconnected from the services for close to an hour.
After fixing the problem, Google apologized for the mishap and said it will try to improve its response time in the near future.
"Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies," said Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering, in a blog post. "We strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today. 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."
The Google outage began at 10.55 am PST when one of its internal systems, which is responsible for generating configurations "encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration." These incorrect configurations made their way to live services in the next 15 minutes, causing errors and data to be muddled, as well as users' request being ignored.
By 11.14 am the issue automatically corrected itself even as engineers were at work trying to debug the same. By 11.30 am, the correct configuration file was live across all affected systems and nearly all services were restored.
Google has promised to upgrade its internal technology in a bid to spot issues quickly.
While the Google outage was affecting its hassled users, rival Yahoo took the opportunity to poke fun at Gmail with some tongue-in-cheek comments on Twitter.
"Gmail is temporarily unavailable" read Yahoo tweet, which was accompanied by an image of Google's "Temporary Error (500)" page. The tweet was later removed.
Yahoo soon realized its folly, possibly recounting its month-long Yahoo Mail woes, and posted an apology.
"Earlier today, a tweet that reflected bad judgment was posted and has been deleted. We apologize to @Google and the @Gmail team," read the Yahoo tweet.
Earlier today, a tweet that reflected bad judgment was posted and has been deleted. We apologize to @Google and the @Gmail team.
— Yahoo (@Yahoo) January 24, 2014
