Google Docs – the company’s net-based document, spreadsheet, and slideshow management system – experienced an hour-long outage on Wednesday, and today, the Mountain View giant attempted to explain.
A previously undetected bug in Docs’ memory management system caused the outage when the Google engineering team attempted to update the application’s collaboration tools, explained engineering director Alan Warren in a blog post.
Since files are stored on multiple servers, Google must access multiple machines each time you update a file on your computer. The bug caused these lookup machines to run out of memory and restart, which kicked the process to other lookup machines, which also suffered from the bug and subsequently restarted. The quick spiral of memory shortages, restarts, and machine switching caused the whole system to crash and go offline for an hour.
“Not our best week,” Warren wrote.
For casual Docs users, an hour-long outage is rarely a problem, but for professionals, the crash highlights a central concern with leaving company-critical documents in a second-party’s servers. Local IT professionals, unless they employed a third-party backup service, were powerless to help their employees access the documents during the outage.
However, this outage is only one of a few site-wide outages this year, the last notable one being on April 21st. Unfortunately for Google, that was the same day Facebook and Microsoft announced their partnership for Docs.com, an MS Office-based product with similar functionality.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Google recognized and apologized for the outage inconvenience.
