25 Feb 2009

Internet giant acknowledges virtualisation crash

Search engine Google has an issued an apology following downtime experienced by its virtualised email service.

The Gmail crash occurred yesterday morning and lasted approximately two and a half hours, potentially affecting millions of customers.

Acacio Cruz, site reliability manager of the service, says routine maintenance at one of the company's European data centres resulted in unexpected side effects and was the catalyst for system-wide crashes.

"It took us about an hour to get it all back under control. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future," he explains.

The downtime affected internal operations at the company, as employees also work through Gmail, though all bugs have now been identified and dealt with, Mr Cruz reveals.

Previously the virtualised service experienced downtime in August 2009, which resulted in the company issuing an open apology to all those affected.