[outages] Google After-Action on the email 550 that *followed* the Big Outage

[Jay R. Ashworth]

PDF, sorry:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus/ir/4et50yp2ckm8otv.pdf

Summary:

"""
Background: The Gmail SMTP inbound service uses a configuration system
that allows specific service options and flags to be changed while the 
service is already deployed in production. The "gmail.com" domain name is
specified as one of these configuration options. An ongoing migration was
in effect to update this underlying configuration system to meet Google 
internal best practices.A configuration change during this migration 
shifted the formatting behavior of a service option so that it incorrectly 
provided an invalid domain name, instead of the intended "gmail.com" 
domain name, to the Google SMTP inbound service. As a result, the service 
incorrectly transformed lookups of certain email addresses
ending in "@gmail.com" into non-existent email addresses.
"""

In short: "Whoops."

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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