In case you wondered where Gmail went

Yesterday, Gmail was off the air for several hours, an unusual, but telling event, that shows that even the "Don't Be Evil" Empire can have its troubles. In this case, it was due, in part, to "[u]nexpected side effects of some new code," otherwise known as the law of unintended consequences. The Intertubes is an entity of fabulous complexity, such that even the smartest guys in room can and will break stuff on their way to making stuff better.
Tracy Kidder, in The Soul of A New Machine, noted that by the late 1970s, computers had become so complex that it would take any given engineer would need more than a lifetime to understand it fully. That became the challenge, to building something larger than oneself. It's a wonderful, noble, and good idea, if you don't mind falling off the cliff every once ina while.

via Google blames Gmail outage on data centre collapse • The Register