Google Runs Out of Disk Space, Sends Tens of Google+ Email Notifications to Users

Google+ may still be invite only, but there are quite a few people on the site already and they're pretty active. So the fact Google started sending out many of them, tens of email notifications, in some cases, even to those that had disabled the feature, didn't go unnoticed.

People got tens of emails from Google, copies of the same message, over and over again for a period yesterday.

This was obviously a glitch in the system and Google has later come out and explained what happened.

Turns out the failure was a rather trivial one, but if it can happen to anyone it can happen to Google as well, the servers storing the notification receipts ran out of disk space and there was no way of storing the notification info, so the emails kept on getting sent.

"Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon," Vic Gundotra, Google's head of social and anything having to do with Google+, wrote on the company's new social network, where else.

"For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes," he said.

"We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have. Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam," he added.

How exactly does Google, the cloud's biggest champion, which has tens of thousands of servers and data centers around the world, run out of space wasn't explained.

Granted, not even Google was expecting the surge in popularity and interest Google+ got, but this is something that could and should have been simple to avert.

But Google did say that this is a test run and that Google+ is still in a beta of sorts, so perhaps this type of problems are to be expected. And the early adopter crowd that flocked to Google+ know what they're getting themselves into and were probably not that bothered by the issue.