• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 9, 2024

Email senders were hit by a worldwide Gmail outage late Thursday afternoon. 

Google reports that “Gmail and Google Drive saw service degradation for a duration of 4 hours 10 minutes.” The peak appeared to be around 5 p.m. ET. 

Of the reports coming into Downdetector, 82% were related to sending problems, 15% involved lack of service connections and 3% were related to website issues. 

The reason? “From preliminary analysis, the root cause was a latent misconfiguration of our lock-service infrastructure that impacted a critical storage layer during a high-load scenario.”

In the U.S., the worst impact was in big cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. 

However, the outage also affected parts of the U.K., Europe, Australia, Asia and South America, reports state. 

Google writes that senders had “issues with attachment functionality. Users may be unable to send emails or save drafts containing attachments. Sending emails without attachments remains functional.”

In addition, “Google Drive users may have observed degraded experience while performing upload operations,” Google adds. 

“Not working at all!!!!,” said one Gmail user on Downdetector.

Another wrote: “I was just able to finally send an e-mail with an attachment, so hopefully it is working now.” Moments later, that person wrote, “I stand corrected. It was working for me but has gone back to not allowing me to send emails with attachments on my Workspace account.”

Of course, Google says: “We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption/outage may have caused.”

But you have to wonder: does this incident presage a larger problem?