My email to employees re: Gmail outage
- TAGS:Gmail, Google, Google Apps, outage
- IT TOPICS:Cloud Computing, Enterprise Apps, Management, Open Source
It isn't all laziness, I swear! There is some value in viewing others' communications about IT outages. With that, today's post is just a paste of my email to my employees regarding Tuesday's Gmail outage (with some good news thrown in to temper the tempers). Feel free to cut and paste it to your employees if you need to relay the same message and you are as lazy as me:
Bonjour a todos,
Tuesday's Gmail outage lasted from 2-4 hours from 9:30GMT until things started getting cleaned up around 12:00GMT. It only affected the Gmail interface, not Entourage or Outlook or mobile devices. I, of course, missed the "event" because I was sleeping, but if something like this should happen again, Google has a website where you can check to see the status of Google Apps:
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#
They are pretty quick to update the site if things go awry. If there is no issue, and you are still unable to get email/calendar/docs/etc, please file a help desk request.
Google sent an email to all Apps System Administrators which I've pasted beneath this message. I hope this is more that enough information to fill your curiosity.
But, there is some good news. Google today implemented a system which you can now attach many files at once to a Gmail.
Up until today, it's been a little tedious to send large or multiple attachments with a web email. You had to select each attachment individually and you never knew how long it would be before those bigger files were ready to send.
As of today, they've made some changes to the way Gmail attachments work. If you want to send a few files from the same folder, simply hold down the Ctrl key (Cmd on OS X) and click on each file you want to attach to your message. You can also hold down the Shift key to select a continuous list of files. A definite time saver!
You'll not only save a few mouse clicks selecting files, but you'll also see progress bars on each file as it uploads.
If you have any questions please visit: http://it.xxx.com or contact me.
Best,
Seth
Dear Google Apps customer,
Between approximately 9AM to 12PM GMT / 1AM to 4AM PST on Tuesday, February 24, 2009, some Google Apps mail users were unable to access their accounts. The actual outage period varied by user because the recovery process was executed in stages. No data was lost during this time. The root cause of the problem was a software bug that caused an unexpected service disruption during the course of a routine maintenance event. The root cause of this unexpected service disruption has been found and fixed.
Additional Details
A few months ago, new software was implemented to optimize data center functionality to make more efficient use of Google's computing resources, as well as to achieve faster system performance for users.
Google's software is designed to allow maintenance work to be done in data centers without affecting users. User traffic that could potentially be impacted by a maintenance event is directed towards another instance of the service. On Tuesday, February 24, 2009, an unexpected service disruption occurred during a routine maintenance event in a data center. In this particular case, users were directed towards an alternate data center in preparation for the maintenance tasks, but the new software that optimizes the location of user data had the unexpected side effect of triggering a latent bug in the Google Mail code. The bug caused the destination data center to become overloaded when users were directed to it, and which in turn caused multiple downstream overload conditions as user traffic was automatically shifted in response to the failures. Google engineers acted quickly to re-balance load across data centers to restore users' access. This process took some time to complete.
The recently launched Apps Status Dashboard includes greater detail on this February 24th incident, including actions we are taking to continually improve performance. For a direct link to this Incident Report, visit http://www.google.com/appsstatus/ir/1nsexcr2jnrj1d6.pdf (English only).
For ongoing service performance information, please access the Apps Status Dashboard at http://www.google.com/appsstatus (English only).
We are very sorry for the inconvenience that this incident has caused. We understand that system problems are inconvenient and frustrating for customers who have come to rely on our products to do many different things. One of Google's core values is to focus on the user, so we are working very hard to make improvements to our technology and operational processes so as to prevent service disruptions. We are confident that we will achieve continuous improvements quickly and persistently.
We will be extending a full 15-day SLA credit to all affected Google Apps Premier customers for the month of February. This credit will be applied to customer accounts automatically so there's no action needed on the part of administrators.
Once again, we apologize for the impact that this incident has caused. Thank you very much for your continued support.
Sincerely,
The Google Apps TeamEmail preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.
Google, Inc.
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