Yesterday, many users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox with multiple email notifications in a quick succession. Well, that was definitely a glitch from Google and they have now apologized for the inconvenience caused to users.

Earlier today, Vic Gundotra, Head of Social at Google, explained what was causing it – Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications.

This is what Gundotra wrote in Google+ explaining the spam:

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.

It seems like Google+ is expanding even faster than Google’s expectation. This issue makes it clear why Google is still calling Google+ a project under field testing. Had Google released Google+ as a public product, this incident would have led to a huge uproar against Google+.

However, because of Gmail’s threaded view all the emails got into a single thread and did not cause much of an inconvenience. But, users who use e-mail clients might definitely have had a tough time managing the sudden bombardment of e-mail messages.

Since the time when Google opened Google+ for testing, more than a million users have signed up for the service. Google has also fixed some rather annoying bugs that were present early on such as old posts getting bumped to the top due to new comments.

Google+ is already fantastic product but as this incident shows, not all the kinks have been ironed out yet. Hence, the reason for Google trying to limit the users.

Here are some more Google Plus related resources, which might be of your interest:

Choose a right mix of Google Plus notifications on e-mail and mobile. Read»

CircleHack brings Google Plus Circles feature to Facebook. Read»

Google Plus come on board Realtime search. Read»

[Review] Why Google+ will be the best Social Network ever? Read»

Facebook hates Google Plus; Blocks Related Chrome App. Read»