What Google’s ‘incident report’ on 4-plus hour lengthy Gmail and Google Drive outage says

Gmail, Google’s e mail service, skilled a world outage on Thursday, August 8, leaving tens of millions of customers unable to ship emails or save attachments for over 4 hours. The disruption, which additionally affected Google Drive, started at 19:15 UTC and lasted till midnight.
In accordance with Google’s Workspace standing dashboard, customers trying to ship emails or save drafts with attachments encountered failures.The outage impacted Gmail’s greater than 1.8 billion energetic customers worldwide, with hundreds reporting points on social media platforms and outage monitoring web sites.

What does Google has to say on Gmail, Google Drive outage

Google has confirmed within the ‘incident report’ that the basis reason for the issue was “a latent misconfiguration of our lock-service infrastructure that impacted a important storage layer throughout a high-load situation.” The corporate emphasised that this was not the results of a cyberattack, assuaging considerations about potential safety breaches.
The outage primarily affected the flexibility to ship emails with attachments and save drafts containing attachments. Customers might nonetheless ship emails with out attachments and obtain emails with attachments through the disruption. Google Drive customers additionally skilled degraded efficiency whereas trying to add recordsdata.
By 22:07 UTC, Google reported that its engineering groups have been implementing a number of fixes, leading to diminished error charges. Nevertheless, it wasn’t till 00:11 UTC on Friday, August 9, that the corporate introduced the problem had been absolutely resolved.
The corporate has issued an apology and promised to launch a full incident report with extra particulars concerning the outage.