Google Message Router is overloaded leading Gmail to go down on Thursday
Google first alerted Workspace users Thursday at 11:30 am ET that some Gmail users might see a delay in receiving emails. On DownDetector, the number of reports about Gmail went from 33 at 11:25 am ET to 761 by 1:55 pm. At 5:03 pm ET, Google issued an update that said, "the issue with email delays was mitigated for the majority of affected users at 2:45 PM" and "a few users may have observed delays until the full mitigation was done at 4:15 PM ET."
70% of those submitting a report on DownDetector said that the problem was receiving their email in a timely manner. 16% complained about sending email on the platform and 14% said that they could not connect with the Gmail server. One Gmail user on DownDetector with the username "Elizabeth" wrote, "Ah, glad to know that it's Gmail and it's not me, I was scared and lost why I couldn't make one, so I guess I'll wait whenever Gmail is back working again."
Graph on DownDetector shows that Gmail was down during Thursday morning-afternoon
Another subscriber to the platform named Michael Hubert wrote, "My emails are not being delivered. it says they are sent but no one is receiving them." As bad as this sounds, it appears that the issue was limited in scope. After all, 761 reports on DownDetector, while a decent jump from the 33 reports submitted two and a half hours before the peak number, indicates that most people weren't affected or didn't know that Gmail was having problems.
Officially, Google says that the incident started at 11:30 am ET and ended at 4:15 pm ET. The issue lasted for 4 hours and 45 minutes. On the Google Workspace Status Dashboard, the company wrote, "Some Gmail users experienced a delay in sending emails globally for a duration of 4 hours and 45 minutes. Any emails that were delayed after entering our system were auto retried and should have been delivered within a couple of hours after mitigation."
As for the cause of the issue, Google wrote, "From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue appears to be an overload in Google Message Router (GMR). Google will complete a full incident report in the following days that will provide a detailed root cause."
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