Over the last 24 hours, you’ve probably noticed that your Gmail has been acting a little funky. It wasn’t just you. In a blog post, the Gmail team explains the issue, saying that a rare, double-SNAFU was to blame for a widespread issue that caused significant delays in the delivery of some email.
According to Google, the message delivery problems were caused by a rare “dual network failure” in which redundant systems stopped working at the same time yesterday morning. (The blog post reports that the failures happened on September 24, but this is certainly a typo — just refer to Google’s Gmail status dashboard.) The hiccup caused at least a brief delay in the delivery of about 29 per cent of messages across the system, with about 1.5 per cent of messages being delayed more than two hours. The problem was cleared by about 9am AEST yesterday.
While 1.5 per cent is a very small percentage of Gmail messages, it adds up to a very big problem on Google’s expansive network. If you felt the pain, you weren’t alone. Kudos to Google for getting it fixed quickly.