A few days ago, many Gmail users complained about a delay in sending emails. Google acknowledged the problem, saying that a fix had been released and saying that a full report on the cause of the disruption would be published later. The company has now provided some details about the incident.
Google said the two cases — one on November 30 and the other on December 1 — affected users for a cumulative period of 6 hours and 23 minutes, and during those hours, Gmail's core message processing system experienced delays in email delivery.
Google has a message processing platform that is responsible for delivering, monitoring, queuing and receiving emails, and during this period, apart from experiencing delays in email delivery of at least 5 minutes, Gmail users may also have noticed an increase in rejected emails .
“The root cause of both incidents was an unusual pattern of email traffic, which resulted in high resource usage in this system and delays in email delivery,” the company said.
The company also apologized to Gmail customers whose email delivery was affected during this disruption, saying it had now implemented rate-limiting mechanisms in its systems. "This is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to deliver to you, and we are taking immediate steps to improve platform performance and availability," it said.
Google said its initial analysis indicates an overload in the Google Message Router (GMR), and added that old emails will be automatically retried and delivered "within the next two hours."
In September of this year, Google Cloud experienced an outage that affected several popular services, including Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube.