Google is apologizing for Monday’s Gmail service disruption, which they say affected 29% of all message sent during the period. During the disruption, messages were slow to deliver and some users had an issue downloading attachments.

Google first reported the issue at 10:25 am EST Monday, and did not fully resolve it until 10:00 pm.

According to the company, most of the delayed messages weren’t really delayed for that long – an average time of just 2.6 seconds. But some users suffered a greater headache:

The impact on users’ Gmail experience varied widely. Most messages were unaffected—71% of messages had no delay, and of the remaining 29%, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5% of messages were delayed more than two hours. Users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors. Throughout the event, Gmail remained otherwise available — users could log in, read messages which had been delivered, send mail, and access other features.

“We’d like to start by apologizing – we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver,” says Sabrina Farmer, Gmail’s Senior Site Reliability Engineering Manager.

“Our top priority is ensuring that Gmail users get the experience they expect: fast, highly-available email, anytime they want it. We’re taking steps to ensure that there is sufficient network capacity, including backup capacity for Gmail, even in the event of a rare dual network failure. We also plan to make changes to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to a network capacity shortfall in the unlikely event that one occurs in the future.”

A Gmail outage is always a big deal, and it’s a giant frustration when it happens at the start of a work week. For the most part, Gmail’s disruption was limited to a small portion of messages. At the time, Google also reported problems with Google Docs and Google presentations – both of which are now up and running smoothly.

Image via Google