Google services go down as software bug causes outage

A massive outage struck Google yesterday that pulled the plug on most of its services including Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents, Headlines and Global News reports.

The web giant addressed the issue in a blog post later yesterday, attributing the outage to a software bug that caused users' data requests to be ignored, the report said.

The company apologised for the massive outage that lasted for around 50 minutes in different parts of the world including, the US, Europe, Canada, and India.

Google said, the massive outage started affecting the services at 11:02 am PST, as the malfunctioning software bug started generating an incorrect configuration at 10:55 am. "The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users' requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors," Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering, said in the company's blog, yesterday.

The issue was attended to by engineers immediately who generated a new configuration to fix the error at 11:14 am. Since, sending configurations to the systems take 15 minutes, the affected services were restored and almost all the users' had access to the web services by 11:30 am.

"Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies-we strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today," Google said.

Meanwhile, FoxNews reports that at the same time that techs were probably scrambling in server rooms to fix the issue, a group of Google gurus known as the Site Reliability Engineering Team were on Reddit answering questions about how they handled outages.

The team was left to bear the wrath of angry users unable to access their email accounts. "Is this the beginning of the apocalypse?," asked one harried user.