September 1, 2009 – Google Inc.’s Gmail (mail.google.com) down due to miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system.

At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific to 2:30 p.m. Pacific, affecting millions of e-mail users, including consumers who get Gmail free accounts and businesses that pay for a version for their staff. The Gmail outage was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

Here’s what happend according to official Gmail blog,

“This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this More >