Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

Jeanne Grosser’s brilliant solution to help solve Google’s massive Gmail outages

15 Sept 2022 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this segment, the speaker recounts a critical incident where a massive Gmail outage generated an overwhelming surge of user support tickets—10,000 messages within 15 minutes—while the support team consisted of only 15 engineers. The backlog made it impossible to respond to users for days. To address this, the speaker leveraged Google’s 20% time policy, recruiting a passionate designer named Braden and a veteran Gmail engineer to prototype a public status page that would inform users of service disruptions in real time. The prototype proved effective, and the approach was later adopted as a standard post‑mortem and status‑page practice across Google, improving communication during outages and reducing support overload.

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Hey, I would love to talk about what happened from a user perspective. And then that became part of the standard postmortem approach. So, an example you gave, when Gmail would have a massive outage, 10,000 people would write us in the support organization in a matter of 15 minutes, and there were 15 people on that team. So, you could imagine what that would do to you. You know, we would literally, we wouldn't be able to get back to these Gmail users for days because the backlog was so bad. I thought, hey, wouldn't it be nice if we could just have a page on the internet that when Gmail went down, we would tell people, we know it's down, but there, there was no one to work on it. Google is known for 20% time at the time. And so I found a passionate designer, his name is Braden, he and I are still in touch, and, and a long-tenured Gmail engineer. I just said, would you use your 20% time to develop this status page, you know, prototype with me? Um, and so we all went and did that, and now, you know, that's a standard at Google.