According to Google, the problem is now solved, but the investigation on the root causes of the outage continue. Users have also been warned that they may be asked to complete a CAPTCHA, which asks them to type in a word or some letters upon accessing their accounts. However, that’s perfectly normal, in order to make sure the users are authentic and not robots, Google said.

 

The most recent update posted by Google revealed that while executing a routine maintenance in one of their European data centers, 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 from that point on, it launched a chain of similar events in other data centers as well.

 

According to Google, the bugs have been identified and fixed, but the investigation on the unusual event still continues.

 

However, this is not the end of the story for Google’s problem this week. The users of Google Talk, the company’s chat service, became the victims of a phishing attack, by the website ViddyHo.com. The Los Angeles Times reported that people targeted by the scam received a message with a link,

leading to a web page that demanded the Google username and password. Users affected by the scam have been advised to change their passwords.