How a Simple Gmail Outage Crashed Google Chrome

Gmail went down yesterday for a relatively short period of time -- service was intermittent for about an hour (compare that to the extended outage of 2009). However, this outage had an unexpected complication: It also caused the Google Chrome browser to crash.

On the surface, that appears very odd: Gmail is a service, but Chrome is an app. Sure, they're both Google products, but they do different things -- why would a hiccup in one affect the other?

It has to do with sync. If you log into Chrome with your Gmail address (and if you want to sync bookmarks, tabs and extensions, you need to), the app on your computer is now tied directly to Google's servers. And, of course, so is Gmail.…
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