A brief outage early on Saturday morning plagued Google services such as Gmail, Calendar, sites and groups, its dashboard has revealed.
At 1.37am, on Saturday morning local time, the Internet giant said it was aware that a problem with several of its services affected a significant subset of users. SA's time zone meant critical services were not disrupted locally.
Google said affected users were not able to access Gmail, and were seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour. Similar issues occurred with other apps such as documents, Calendar, Google sites, Google groups and admin console.
Most of the services were restored a minute later and the rest of the system was up four minutes later. Google is not commenting on the cause of the issue.
Under its business service level agreement, which covers apps such as Gmail and Calendar, the Web interface will be operational and available to customers at least 99.9% of the time in any calendar month. If this is not met, customers get credits.
GoSquared, an analytics company, noted the outage led to a 40% drop in the number of page views going into its real-time tracking. "That's huge. As Internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge. It's also of note that page views spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination."
Swift Consulting founder and tech analyst Liron Segev says as so many services were affected, the issue is likely to have happened at the core of its infrastructure as Google is built on a decentralised model.
Segev notes that had it happened during working hours on Friday in SA, as it did with other parts of the world, critical services such as mail and calendar would have been briefly down. "For something to go that wrong across the world, it's got to be serious."
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