Google's e-mail service, Gmail, was smacked with an outage lasting two and half hours yesterday morning. However, Google responded to it quickly.

In an explanation released through Gmail blog, Google says that a routine maintenance took place in one of Google's Data center in Europe while pushing up a new code that will keep data near to its owner.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another, said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post.

In order to compensate customers for any lost business due to the outage, reports say that Google will offer 15 days of free service to businesses and organizations that pay for the email service.

The company also issued an open apology via its Gmail blog for the outage Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours and we're very sorry. We did everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now resolved. said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post.

Not only the outage was the problem encountered of Google on Tuesday. A phishing scam attacked the Google Talk chat service. Users of the chat service received a link saying Check out this video and when clicked users were directed to a website called ViddyHo.com which ask for Gmail ID's and Passwords. The scammers have now been blocked and Google blacklisted the ViddyHo site.

Google promise to investigate every inch of their services that may cause trouble from it users.

Software Google