What caused Gmail to go down for 4 hours?
Access to Gmail, the world’s largest free email provider, was disrupted for more than four hours worldwide on Thursday, 8 August. Thousands of users reported being unable to send email or save attachments. Unhappy users quickly started sharing ‘Oops, something went wrong’ messages on social media platforms such as X.
The good news is that this doesn’t appear to have been any kind of cyberattack, be that denial of service or otherwise. This should come as a huge relief to all Gmail users, especially those who messaged me in the middle of the night here in the U.K. to ask if their inboxes were safe. So, what actually happened?
Oops, Something Went Wrong, Gmail Says
Google has confirmed that the outage started at 19:15 UTC on Thursday and lasted until midnight. The Google Workspace status dashboard reported the issue as being with Gmail, resulting in “Users trying to send emails or save drafts with attachments would experience failures.” Engineers were said to be investigating the issue, but no workarounds were available; it was very much a matter of wait-and-see.
And wait people did, with little choice in the matter. At 22:07 UTC, Google confirmed that engineers were “actively implementing several fixes,” which had resulted in fewer error rates being reported. However, those fixes had still not resolved the incident for everyone. Google said that the sending of emails issue had been resolved as long as you didn’t try to attach anything. Even saving drafts with an attachment was not working, although receiving emails with attachments was possible. At 00:11 UTC on the morning of Friday, 9 August, Google posted a status update to say that the fix from the engineering teams had been successful and the issue was now fully resolved.
Google Issues Mini Incident Report As Interim Measure
While awaiting a full incident report from Google, an interim mini-report has been published. As well as apologising for the service outage, Google stated that the disruption lasted for 4 hours and 10 minutes and, interestingly, impacted both Gmail and Google Drive. The fact that Google Drive was affected would explain why attachments appear to have been at the heart of the problem.
“From preliminary analysis,” Google said, “the root cause was a latent misconfiguration of our lock-service infrastructure that impacted a critical storage layer during a high-load scenario.”
As well as Gmail users noticing the very obvious issue of not being able to send or save emails with attachments, Google confirmed that Google Drive users “may have observed degraded experience while performing upload operations.”
I have contacted Google for further details relating to this incident, but, in the meantime, if anyone is experiencing problems with Gmail or Google Drive outside of the impacts as already mentioned, Google asks them to reach out to Google Workspace Support using this help article.