Google’s new social networking service might be an effective way to take on the mighty Facebook, but it looks like it could allocate a larger budget to the project after a disk space error bombarded users with email notifications over the weekend.
The spam messages that were sent to the users’ emails were the product of bugs in the Google+ code. It kicked in because the website’s servers were unable to cope with the high demand.
On Saturday, Google’s Senior Vice President for “Social” Vic Gundotra apologized for the glitch, saying: “Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon. 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.”
“We didn’t expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly,” added Gundotra, “but we should have. Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.”
The reason for the growth of users in the service is due to a loophole that enabled users to invite their friends to join Google+ before the official invitation scheme was in place. Because of this, the company lost control of the number of people joining their service.
Aside from providing a bigger server to look after notification tracking, Google is also banning some members, particularly businesses, which will be invited back once the company launches a Google+ service for companies.
via: Electric Pig
