Google 'ran out of disk space.' How did that happen?
Google+ grew overwhelmed, leading the search-engine giant to accidentally spam its users, according to the company.
For a short time Monday night, Google "ran out of disk space." The company blames the hot demand for Google+.
Many Google+ users saw a massive amount of notification email messages from the service this afternoon, and now Google鈥檚 head of social, Vic Gundotra, has an explanation.
鈥淔or about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications,鈥� Gundotra on Google+ Monday. 鈥淗ence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.鈥�
The spam notifications seems to have affected users differently. I received a quick succession of 41 repeat notification messages around 5PM Eastern this afternoon, while others I鈥檝e talked to didn鈥檛 notice any issues. Luckily for me (and I assume many others), the spam messages got filed under a single conversation thread on Gmail. On my iPhone, however, I received a headache-inducing string of 41 individual messages.
鈥淲e didn鈥檛 expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have,鈥� Gundotra added. Indeed, it seems strange for a company with seemingly limitless resources to by stymied by a simple disk space issue.
Gundotra apologized for the spam issues several times throughout his message. He also reiterated that Google+ is still in a 鈥渇ield trial,鈥� a reminder that he鈥檚 likely hoping will lead users to go easy on Google over the gaffe. Google typically keeps its services in perpetual beta testing mode, which some have criticized as a way for the company to slough off blame for any technical issues that arise.
But we鈥檒l likely see even more issues than normal arise from Google+, since its 鈥渇ield trial鈥� status 鈥� which has led Google to limit participation in the service so that it can see how Google+ handles the initial stampede of traffic 鈥� seems to indicate that it may be even less mature than a typical Google beta test.
For a field test though, Google+ seems to be off to a good start. It鈥檚 been the most buzzed about tech topic since , and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also (not that that鈥檚 a huge surprise).