Google+ crippled by demand, inadvertently sends spam

Consumer Reports News: July 11, 2011 04:08 PM

How popular is Google's experimental social network project, Google+? Not only is Facebook founder and competitor Mark Zuckerberg already the top Google+ profile with the largest number online connections, apparently lots of other folks want in too.

Maybe too many people.

On Saturday, Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra wrote on the official Google+ blog:

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, but we should have.

Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.

Google's mea culpa and technical difficulties aside, Consumer Reports' experts are starting to test out Google+. We hope to bring you our first impressions of the search engine's social network project soon.

In the meantime, have you been invited to try Google+? What are your experiences? Any technical difficulties? Share them below.

Vic Gundotra's post on Saturday July 9, 2011 [Official Google+ blog]
Google+ runs out of disk space, floods inboxes with notification spam [Engadget]

—Paul Eng