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Gmail Is Broken Right Now, One Day After a Massive Outage (techcrunch.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the technical-difficulties dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While it doesn't appear to be completely down like it was yesterday morning, we're hearing many reports from Gmail users that the email service is having major issues right now. Some users are reporting that Gmail is particularly slow, while others are reporting constant error messages. One TechCrunch writer, meanwhile, noticed that emails he was sending to Gmail accounts appeared to immediately bounce, with Gmail's server responding with an error reading "550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."

Google confirms the issues on its services dashboard, writing at 1:30 PM Pacific that they're impacting a "significant" number of users: "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior." In a second update at 2:30 PM, Google says its teams are "continuing to investigate this issue"; as of 3:30 PM, the company says it expects the issues to be fixed by 4:00 PM while noting that time may change. Google says the problems have been resolved, although encrypted email service ProtonMail tweets that the email bouncing issue is widespread, with many emails sent to Gmail users bouncing permanently.
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Gmail Is Broken Right Now, One Day After a Massive Outage More

Gmail Is Broken Right Now, One Day After a Massive Outage

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  • I wonder if it's related

    • Re:My online Outlook has been screwy also (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @04:20AM (#60836538)

      Its "all eggs, one basket" these days.

      • Yep, it’s a bit like how nearly all commercially sold bananas are one single plant that’s been cloned over and over, now every farmer fears a single fungus will wipe out the worlds production.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Pretty much. Mono-cultures are always a very bad idea. They are cheap initially though and today's "leaders" only care for short term profits.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Would be interesting to hear of a large scale email system that proved more reliable than Gmail. What are we talking about here, literally minutes of downtime over how many years?

        I've never known a corporate system to be more robust, that's for sure.

        • Re:My online Outlook has been screwy also (Score:5, Informative)

          by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @08:42AM (#60836996)

          We are talking 90 minutes complete outage yesterday and continues problems yesterday and today. FYI, for the (old) TelCo standard of 99.999% uptime, those 90 minutes represent the complete outage allowed for 176 years. This is not minor in any way.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            But again, can you point to any email service that is actually more reliable than Gmail?

            I doubt any of them get 99.999% uptime. That number also fails to account for the nature of the down-time, if it's "sorry we deleted all your mail but at least the outage only lasted 39 seconds" you might not care about the speed with which the service came back up.

            I see to have slept through all this, I didn't notice any email issues at all over the last few days.

            • You mean, randomly discarding incoming mail after having accepted it? If you consider a piece of mail to be spam, you need to reject it in the SMTP dialog, not silently hide.

            • Hmm, "email service" is vague. Do you mean ISP with a web mail, or a third party web-mail service unaffiliated with an ISP? The issue is that gmail was bouncing incoming emails for quite a long time, for a huge number of accounts, twith an error that those accounts do not exis. When I've seen email go down in the past it's because of an internet outage, not because of the underlying servers were rejecting addresses. The worst that would happen in the past is that the net would come back up and your emai

            • Not an email service, but life has existed for some 3.5 billion years on Earth. 100% uptime, so far!

              • Yeah, but we came pretty close to an outage 67 million years ago, and 252 million years ago; and maybe 550 million. Where would you be if one of those incidents had been a complete outage?

      • And the basket is also in the clouds.

  • Just rename it to Golly-Gmail and lower the service delivery standards

  • AWS Introduces New Chaos Engineering as a Service (Score:4, Funny)

    by igelineau ( 4296473 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @12:57AM (#60836288)
    The same day. A coincidence ? I don't think so !

  • Automated emails to customers (confirming orders, etc) were bouncing on random Gmail addresses (some fine, some would bounce), oddly they were bouncing almost immediately, rather than there being multiple attempts to deliver (as ought to be standard?) Error messages stated the email account didn't exist.

    • Re:Yup, emails to customers were bouncing today.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @01:38AM (#60836340)

      oddly they were bouncing almost immediately, rather than there being multiple attempts to deliver (as ought to be standard?) Error messages stated the email account didn't exist.

      I'm pretty sure just about all mail agents won't attempt multiple deliveries when an account is reported to not exist - and why would they?

      Multiple attempts only happen for more generic and ephemeral delivery errors.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'm pretty sure just about all mail agents won't attempt multiple deliveries when an account is reported to not exist - and why would they?

        Multiple attempts only happen for more generic and ephemeral delivery errors.

        Correct.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Zocalo ( 252965 )

        Multiple attempts only happen for more generic and ephemeral delivery errors.

        Per the RFCs, yes. In practice, it actually seems to depend more on the specific species of marketing weasel responsible for the sending of the emails. Job agencies seem to be notoriously bad for ignoring 5xx errors, and some of the larger email service providers seem to operate a pretty lax interpretation of the RFCs when it comes to 5xx's as well. Spammers obviously don't give a damn and/or never get to see the status messag

      • And it's a bizarre error to return in the first place. There are other error codes to be used here that don't say "your recipient does not exist" and causing people to phone up relatives asking what their presumably new email address is. Clearly it's a bug, some naive young programmer adding a feature in a two week sprint used the wrong mapping of a database failure to an SMTP error code.

        Ie, should have used error code 450, "Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable", instead i got an error of 5

  • May have already been fixed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rastos1 ( 601318 )
      It works find for me as well. Perhaps because I touch them only using ten foot pole called IMAP.

  • The perfect storm. (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @01:47AM (#60836350)
    Did someone do a reply all?
  • Long as youtube is still working.

  • How could this happen ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TTL0 ( 546351 ) on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @05:18AM (#60836624)

    I thought the Cloud and Kubernetes solved any issues of downtime ?

    • I thought the Cloud and Kubernetes solved any issues of downtime ?

      It's precisely that thinking which causes downtime.

      But before I get my pitchfork out, can you point to a document where Google has said the Cloud and Kubernetes offers 100% uptime? I can't help but compare gmail to my ISP's and my company's email server, both of which seems to be at least an order of magnitude if not more unreliable than gmail...

    • K8s makes development and deployment easier than hacking together some ssh/scp and shell scripts (or even Ansible). Obviously if you hardware, network, or product are fucked then you're going to have a bad time.

      For what it's worth, Borg worked pretty well when I used it, but it's not a panacea. You still have to have quality software, quality processes, and quality infrastructure if you want to provide excellent service.

    • I thought Kubernetes was a new type of exercise, sort of a cross between Pelaton and Pilates.

  • ... from last week's Monday that lasted almost all day. Sheesh!

  • Probably had a SolarWind attack

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Probably had a SolarWind attack

      Could be. Think Google would use someone else's monitoring?

      If I could bet on this, I'd bet it was an UN-authorized change, or an authorized change that wasn't tested.

      My gmail account was doing wonky things about two weeks ago. Wondered if they were updating the VM that my account is on.
      Migration from Centos 8 to Centos 8 streams? LOL.

  • *points gun* Always has been.
  • It's also always broken. Try to bulk delete emails for example. They want you to buy more space so they crippled the bulk tools with intentional errors. This has been the case for at least several years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      It's also always broken. Try to bulk delete emails for example. They want you to buy more space so they crippled the bulk tools with intentional errors. This has been the case for at least several years.

      Try connecting via a mail client, like evolution. You shouldn't have a problem deleting from there. In fact I like the whole experience better using Evolution than their web interface. I've never been a web interface type of guy for that stuff.

  • Gmail has excellent anti-spam and malware capability.

    Bad guys wish we all used something less effective. They are under constant attacks looking for a way to leak in and the countermeasures surely cause issues.

    The root cause of these problems are sociopaths attacking our computer systems, not ineffective engineers.

    We need to wake up, pass laws, sign treaties, and fund a transparent agency that locates and provides evidence to local authorities to enforce laws that protect us.

    We need to demand that
  • Really? I suppose if you want to use their Drive backup or want to post to YouBoob.

  • I've seen a few posts saying "It hasn't affected me."

    Unless you don't use gmail or email anyone who does, how can you be sure?

    I sent one email yesterday to two recipients, and got a "does not exist" error for one of them within seconds, and I resent it, and they got it and replied. Almost 11 hours later, I got a notification that the other recipient "didn't exist" either. So it may take quite awhile before you know.

    Also, how do you know if you aren't getting emails others sent to you?

  • It sounds like this is an isolated incident. I have 3 gmail accounts.

  • I only use gmail for things that aren't important like the various web site log-ins I have to have to because they don't let you check out as guest anymore. For family/work I have different, more private, email addresses.

  • Does Google use SolarWinds for monitoring, by chance? Kidding, of course (and it wasn't even a good joke).

    No correlation, and no causation, but it would be kind of funny if there was a connection.

  • Maybe I'll pull out one of those AOL CDs I got in the snail-mail.

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