On Friday, nearly 42 million Google users were left unable to log into Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents for a specific time due to an outage.  According to reports, some users suffered the outage for nearly 25 minutes, while others suffered for more than 30 minutes.

At 10:55 am PST on Friday, one of Google’s internal systems responsible for generating configurations “encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration,” which made its way to live services within 15 minutes and caused errors, muddled data, and ignored users’ requests.

By 11:14 am, the issue had automatically resolved itself, whilst Google’s engineers were working to fix the bug.  At 11:30 nearly all services were restored as the correct configuration file went live across all affected systems.

Google was quick to apologize for the inconvenience and promised to improve its response time.

“Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies,” said Ben Treynor, Google’s VP of Engineering, in a blog post. “We strive to make all of Google’s services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today. The issue has been resolved, and we’re now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn’t happen again.”

Yahoo! too quick to judge

Though the issue was quickly resolved, Yahoo! couldn’t help but poke fun of Google for the outage.  It tweeted, “”Gmail is temporarily unavailable,” accompanied by an image of Google’s “Temporary Error (500)” page.

Someone must have realized the grave error in that tweet, or the team responsible for the tweet was reprimanded, as the tweet was quickly deleted.  Yahoo has no right to make fun of Google for a 30 minute or so service outage when its users suffered almost a month of service outage near the end of 2013.  A significant amount of Yahoo users were unable to access their email, and weren’t too happy with all the missing features when the service was updated.

Yahoo was quick to issue an apology for its crass remark.

Earlier today, a tweet that reflected bad judgment was posted and has been deleted. We apologize to @Google and the @Gmail team.

— Yahoo (@Yahoo) January 24, 2014

photo credit: tehbieber via photopin cc