Gmail, google’s popular email service took an outage today. If you want to get a hint of what kind of impact that can make, check out google trends . The top 5 search terms are about gmail being down

Google trends:

I am sure some posts will crop up with something negative to say. But show me an email service that uses ajax, tags your emails, provides chatting integrated with the browser, (oh ! I could go on) and is so reliable. When was the last time you heard about a gmail outage ? Some of the best services out there are not as reliable as the free gmail.

Google’s SLA was also broken due to the down time, which seems to have spanned about 2-3 hours. If rumors are to be believed, google is offering a 15 day service chargeback to its paying customers instead of a 3 day service chargeback that the SLA covers. That would work out to around 2$. Gmail labs also provides an offline service, so not all users may have been affected.

As for the cause of failure, google was attempting to do some routine maintenance on its servers when some of its routers became overloaded. They underestimated the load that the servers would have to take, which caused the outage. You can read more about the technical causes of failure on the gmail blog where Ben Treynor, VP Engineering explains.