<p>Google has responded to a widespread Gmail blackout Friday that disconnected as many as 42 million users for up to an hour. In a blog post, VP of Engineering Ben Traynor said that an internal software bug was behind the error.</p><p>"At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration," Traynor wrote. "The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users' requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors."</p><p>The outage, Traynor continued, essentially fixed itself when the system responsible for the malfunction automatically generated the correct configuration and began propagating that throughout Google's live services.</p><p>Google offered an apology for the mishap and vowed to improve its response time for future incidents.</p><p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/24/heres-what-caused-that-massive-gmail-outage/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/26/google-glitch-sent-thousands-of-emails-to-some-guys-hotmail-account/">Google Glitch Sent Thousands of Emails to Some Guy&#039;s Hotmail Account</a> (TIME)</p><p><a href="http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/401798/mailbird-best-email-client-windows-gmail">Mailbird - The best email client for Windows + Gmail</a> (ITworld.com)</p><p><a href="http://www.maximumpc.com/google_apologizes_gmail_outage_yahoo_sorry_throwing_stones2014">Google Apologizes for Gmail Outage, Yahoo Sorry for Throwing Stones</a> (Maximum PC)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=d4xcOK5CZyT-0GMtqRVHW4Vk94e8M&authuser=0&ned=us">77 additional articles.</a></p>