In order to compensate developers for the Google App Engine downtime last week, Google plans to give paid subscribers to the cloud development service a 10 percent refund on their October bills. According to the company, about half of requests to the cloud-based service failed during four hours on Friday.
Google said the outage resulted when routers at one of its data centers became overloaded, and attempts to reset the hardware exacerbated the problem. “In response to this incident, we have increased our traffic routing capacity and adjusted our configuration to reduce the possibility of another cascading failure. Multiple projects have been in progress to allow us to further scale our traffic routers, reducing the likelihood of cascading failures in the future,” blogged Google App Engine’s Peter S. Magnusson.