Infinite Path

Google has suffered yet another blow in its quest to provide secure and consistently reliable web services to millions of users across the world after it emerged that a global Gmail crash occurred yesterday.

It is thought that the crash happened after servers were taken offline for routine maintenance. The additional burden created by this removal was the final straw for the already-overloaded remaining servers, which have been struggling lately after Google introduced large-scale structural changes.

Officials at Google were not exactly quick to respond but when their reaction to the widespread issue did come, it seemed to acknowledge the serious nature of the day’s events. Ben Treynor, the vice president of engineering for Gmail, expressed regret at the service failure, particularly since so many “people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications”.

Some of these 150 million users across the world took to other online spaces to vent mounting frustration at being unable to access their email. Twitter was inundated by tweets from irritated users, some humourous, some expressing genuine anger at the situation.

It seems likely that the top dogs at Google won’t be finding any element of humour in the situation, however, particularly after other high-profile glitches over the past eight months. Google Search, Google News, Google Maps, and Google Reader have all suffered from outages and slow performances, whilst Gmail has been no stranger to lengthy service failures itself.

The importance to Google of keeping both individuals and businesses content with their Gmail service should not be underestimated. Companies are increasingly preferring to use Gmail in an effort to save money in the current economic climate but, if unreliable service continues to plague Google’s offering and make the headlines, businesses may be forced to look elsewhere in the future.