(Image source: Google+)

BY CHELSEA MCGARTLAND

ANCHOR JIM FLINK

Google+ users got an 80-minute dose of notification spam this weekend. The Register explains how it all happened.

“The spam messages carried some of the hallmarks of those generated by dodgy apps of the type that have become a regular nuisance on Facebook over recent months. In reality, however, the messages were the product of bugs in the Google+ code, which had kicked in because the site was unable to cope with early demand.”

Google’s Senior Vice-President of Social Vic Gundotra used his own Google+ account to issue a public apology for the glitch:

“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.”

Gundotra reminded users that Google+ is still in a “field trial”. A Venture Beat writer says it’s normal for a fledgling site to have problems... but did anyone expect disk space to be one of them?

“...it seems strange for a company with seemingly limitless resources to by stymied by a simple disk space issue. … But we’ll likely see even more issues than normal arise from Google+, since its ‘field trial’ status ... seems to indicate that it may be even less mature than a typical Google beta test.”

But a blogger for MSNBC says Google seems to have fixed this problem fairly quickly. And running out of disk space? Maybe it’s just a sign of success.

“Yes, laugh all you want, but even a service run by search engine giant Google can temporarily run out of disk space if its engineers underestimate just how popular it will become. Don't worry though: Whatever issues there were over the weekend appear to be resolved at this point...”