[adrianmonk]

That's an interesting theory because the timing does correlate.

A lot of people would immediately dismiss it because Google has the resources to scale up. But having resources doesn't guarantee someone actually turns the knob that increases the number of instances. (Whether automatic or manual, the adjustment could be too slow to match an unanticipated spike in demand.)

But there's another reason I don't think that's the explanation. Gmail has 1.5 billion active users[1]. Millions of students logging in at the same time sounds like a lot, but if Gmail has 100 million more active users today than yesterday, that's not even a 10% increase!

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[1] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

[jordanthoms]

I don't think it's the load on Gmail that's an issue. I'd point more to Google Drive, Docs and the underlying shared storage infrastructure. Also keep in mind most of those 1.5 billion users won't be very active - a few million users that have no usage at all for a few months and then all come back to being extremely active within a few days can be pretty disruptive!

IMO it's not really about having the resources to scale, but the unpredictable emergent behaviours which can happen when the load profile suddenly changes