Rumor: Ugly Gmail scheme broke Gmail

According to deep throat sources inside the hallowed walls of Google, MG Siegler of VentureBeat is to blame for yesterday’s Gmail outage. The outage, which lasted two and half hours, is rumored to have been triggered by Sieglers toxic combination of “melons and eggplant.” On behalf of an agitated world, let me offer the first big, “thanks” to Siegler.

Fearing retaliation from Siegler (after all, look what he said to Engdaget after they made disparaging remarks toward the writer), Google’s official explanation blames some hapless code monkey for wayward code. Somewhere, in a dark apartment in Europe, a code monkey weeps at the deception. The official line:

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

To further sweep the mess under the carpet, Google is offering users 15 days credit for those who pay for their Gmail for the two and half hour disruption to service. This move smacks of a clear sense of guilt and embarrassment that the combination of their stock colors could bring the whole system down.

Google says the code problem is fixed now in typical, “move along, nothing to see here folks.” If you take the first and last letter of each sentence in their blog post update on the issue and unscramble you get: “melons and eggplant don’t mix.” Perhaps we should all just stick to regular themes?

My weak-kneed editor suggests I inform you Mr. Siegler is not to blame for the outage and the whole thing may or may not have been a figment of my wild imagination that I should put to better uses like selling hot dogs from a cart.

Source: [VentureBeat]