Cloud Computing: Google Drive hit by three outages this week

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications. As logged in the official Google Apps Status site, the first incident happened on Monday, and was an outage that lasted about three hours and affected 33 percent of Google Drive user requests.

Affected users got error messages, long load times and timeouts, according to an incident report posted on Wednesday. This problem was triggered by a bug in the Google network’s control software, which caused the system to shift traffic over to unaffected network connections and servers. Unfortunately, this traffic load-balancing increased latency in the servers and caused another glitch, this time in the software that manages Drive user connections and sessions, causing the access problems…

According to Google, it fixed the control software bug that caused the initial problem, and will change its load balancing policy to provide "greater isolation" between network services. The company is also fixing the second Drive-specific bug, making changes so Drive will be "far more resilient" to latency and errors, and to improve Drive’s alert and monitoring system…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/google-drive-hit-three-outages-week-215073