Google and its products are always considered to be reliable. To a lay man internet means “Google”.

The picture above clearly shows how much reliable Google is for the mass. But, of course there are times when this reliability could be hit by one or the other reason. There are always some technical issues related to a service and its stability. But, with Google, expectations are more and a single small err makes it an issue.

So was the case yesterday at 6 AM (PST), Gmail faced an issue, so called ‘vowel outage’ by the official Gmail blog. The bug led to disappearing of vowels from user’s Gmail Account. When they logged in to their account, they found all the vowels missing.  Y** c*n *m*g*n* h*w d*ff*c**t *t b*c*m*s t* r**d **t th* s*nt*nc*s. Confused..!!! Its “you can imagine how difficult it becomes to read out the sentences”. J

Within an hour Google received numerous reports of this issue via help forums, from colleagues at Google, and via email sent by its users. Some of the users found creative workarounds for communicating without vowels, here is an example :

Sam Schillace, Gmail’s Engineering Director reported that

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage.

Though, this issue caused a lot of inconvenience to its users, on contrary it was working fine for both IMAP and POP access. Those who used these features did not suffer much. But for a lay man, knowing internet as “Google” with  basic knowledge of sending/receiving mails and Googling the web, it brought in hiccups.

With a team of sincere and dedicated engineers Gmail resolved the issue within a few hours. And by 3:02 PM (PST) Gmail was back to its original state.

(via official Gmail Blog)

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