<p>The brief failure struck on Monday afternoon, cutting off up to 170 million Gmail users around the world for 18 minutes.</p><p>Google apologised and said the problem had been traced to a bug in a routine update to its load balancing software. It falsely detected that some data centres were offline, and so triggered a failsafe mechanism designed to stop all Google services being cut off.</p><p>"The Google load balancers have a failsafe mechanism to prevent this type of failure from causing Googlewide service degradation, and they continued to route user traffic," said Google's incident report.</p><p>"As a result, most Google services, such as Google Search, Maps, and AdWords, were unaffected. However, some services, including Gmail, that require specific data center information to efficiently route users' requests, experienced a partial outage."</p><p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9740401/Google-blames-Gmail-disruption-on-faulty-update.html">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/12/12/google-explains-how-gmail-died/">Google explains how Gmail died | The Technology Chronicles | an SFGate.com ...</a> (San Francisco Chronicle (blog))</p><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/10/gmail-experiences-a-widespread-outage-most-users-affected/">Gmail Experiences A Widespread Outage, Many Users Affected</a> (TechCrunch)</p><p><a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/why-gmail-chrome-and-drive-went-down-today/59822/">Why Gmail, Chrome, and Drive Went Down Today</a> (The Atlantic Wire)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dCn6OF5hOAvQeUM_Uu6OaBQtOdTRM&ned=us">641 additional articles.</a></p>