Google+ spams its own users due to lack of disk space
Managed to bag yourself an early invitation to the new Google+ social network? Then yesterday you may have had to deal with a barrage of spam notification messages suggesting you’d bagged yourself a zillion new friends in a matter of minutes.
No, this wasn’t another case of hacking shenanigans, but merely an oversight on behalf of Google. A lack of disk space meant that the same automated notification messages were sent out repeatedly to users for 80 minutes, filling users’ mailboxes up with replicated friend updates.
“Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon,” wrote Vic Gundotra, Google’s head of social, on the Google+ blog.
“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, but we should have.
“Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.”
