40-minute disruption of service for the Chrome Web browser and Gmail service was not a good thing for Google. There was no official reason given about why it happen. At least not in a timely manner. Some thought the company was hit with a denial-of-service attack. Google engineer Tim Steele said that the reason for the crash had to do with the Google Sync servers getting overwhelmed following a change in the code. So, it was not a hack but an internal fail. However, being left without my go to browser. I went to Firefox. I wonder how many others were put off by the crash.
Tim Steele said: “It’s due to a backend service that sync servers depend on becoming overwhelmed, and sync servers responding to that by telling all clients to throttle all data types. The “throttling” messed things up in the browser and caused it to crash.