Google’s Gmail crashed for two hours this week while many officials of the search engine company apologized for the downtime, but there were never the only ones to have suffered such an experience. There are hundreds of mistakes alike, of which some found the responsible and others didn’t.

Google’s latest crash occurred on February 24. The reason that the company gave was that they were testing new software during the data centre maintenance. The company apologized and said that the ones who subscribe to Gmail and pay it will have 15 days of free access because of the incident. Millions of people had been disturbed by Gmail’s downtime on August 11, 2008 too.

Another problem that can occur and crash a site is the success it has and thus, the number of visitor each day. The 1901 census website had been long advertised before it had actually been released. Pieces of information on genealogy and UK ancestry became strong points of interest for 30 million visitors a day.
Yet, the site couldn’t handle that much as it had been designed to handle a daily influx of 1 million visitors. So it crashed unexpectedly and it was removed for five after it had been opened on January 2002. Yet, the site stayed down for another seven months.

The Transport for London Web site crashed in February 2009 together with the National Rail Enquiries because the visitors hit it by 800% more than it had been designed to take. What was the reason? Many travel web sites were invaded with people looking for a place to go to work. It seems like not even the Web sites can take this economic crisis anymore.

More than 32,000 users accessed the two Web sites every second so enquiries on the AA and RAC web sites slowed down the access finally.