AP Photo

Gmail went down for 18 minutes during prime email checking hours on the West Coast thanks to a routine software update conducted Monday morning. But in an era of continuous code deployment Google’s mid morning update isn’t unusual — it’s the future.

Google’s webmail service Gmail was down for 18 minutes last week after a “routine update” broke the service for a few minutes. The search giant reported that it conducted a routine update of its load balancing software between 8:45 AM PT and 9:13 AM PT and after the problems were detected managed to quickly roll back...