Rumor: Ugly Gmail scheme broke Gmail

Google’s official explanation for the Gmail outage 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.