Google has admitted that it has run out of disk space for its Google+ social networking service according to its SVP of social networking, Vic Gundotra.

Barely two weeks old, Google+ has already attracted such a high number of members. Gundotra wrote on his Google+ profile, "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."

He added that Google didn't anticipate the service to hit a high threshold so quickly but that the company should have. This really shouldn't have come as such a surprise to Google and you would have to wonder why the Internet giant didn't set aside the disk space before launching the social network. Or were they too burned by previous efforts at launching a social network that they really didn't think Google+ would take off as it did?

Gundotra remains apologetic about the mishap: "Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again," he wrote, adding that the company was "very sorry for the spam."

If Google+ continues to grow as it is, it now has 4.5 million users in the two weeks its up, then Google really needs to step up its game to keep up. If it wants to directly compete with Facebook who has nearly 750 million users worldwide, then Google needs to bolster its storage capabilities. At least this is only a field trial for Google+ and the company can still pass off the major oversight of having run out of storage space as part of the trial. Imagine the hoopla if it opened the service to everyone and promptly ran out of disk space.

Gundotra's comment also said that there will be more changes to the social network service this week to address some criticisms. Google+ users should hope that means more disk space.