Google accidentally passed the Chrome army self-destruction code

Google Gmail didn’t work on Monday for 20 minutes. It was unpleasant, but the case is not unprecedented. This kind of shutdown happens all the time. The strange thing is that the failure in Gmail coincided with the general fall of Google Chrome browsers.



Late on Monday, Google engineer Tim Steele confirmed that the blame for the failure lies with the developers of the company. He said that the fall also affected those Chrome users who used another Google web service, Sync, and that Sync and other services of the company — Gmail supposedly also — were turned off on Monday due to the fact that Google had incorrectly configured the load balancer.





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Sync is essentially a Google response to Apple iCloud. This software service is created by Google to untie web surfers from their desktops. It runs in the background, passing information between the Chrome browser and Google servers, so that people who log in to Google can get their bookmarks, extensions, and apps — no matter what computer they are on.



Steele wrote that on Monday, problems with Google Sync servers caused such errors in the browser that he could not cope with and he had to close with an error.



“This is due to the back-end service, which is responsible for distributing the load on the server — in the event of an overload, the server begins to respond to the client that it does not process any types of data,” says Steele. This shutdown message caused browsers to crash and crash.



The problem did not last long, but spread widely. There are dozens of crash reports on Hacker News. “My Chrome drops every ten minutes during the last half hour,” wrote one of the users. ( From the author : Failure in Chrome really looked very strange and unpleasant. It just periodically fell with an error and it was generally incomprehensible what causes it and what to actually do. )



This may be the first call. Curve code on the page may cause a crash in the browser, but the Monday error looks quite different: a large-scale crash was due to a web service that provides the browser.



Think of it as the back of cloud computing. The Google chip has always been that its services are easier to use and have fewer errors in them than in the curved desktop software. But the problem with Sync has shown that when Google disconnects, it can not only cut you off the mail - but also cause more global problems with a desktop program, such as a barser.



Chrome is proud that it works like a sandbox, so problems with one page can cause only one tab in the browser to crash, and not cause the entire program to crash. But this is exactly what happened with the Monday bug. He brought down the entire browser.



“This is definitely a big and unusual problem, because if the browser crashes, then this is the fall of the Chromium model itself,” says Kevin Quennesson, CTO of the online photo service Everpix.



“When you bring authentication, identification and the cloud to the desktop application, you may encounter very strange failures,” writes David Ulevich, founder of OpenDNS, in turn.



These kinds of problems will occur more frequently, as developers work to create browsers like Rockmelt, which do more than just browse, says Michael Machemoff, former member of the Google Chrome team, founder of Player FM. "People are trying to integrate more identity and this kind of synchronization and social services."



This is the problem that cloud service providers like Apple iCloud and Windows Live will have to worry more and more, so they are more and more intertwined with our phones and computers.



“The transfer of authentication and identity to one provider, in case of its instability, can have far-reaching consequences,” says Ulevich. “Imagine a scenario in which you simply cannot open your Android phone or make a call to Google Voice. This is not just your browser. ”