Google's Gmail experiences downtime

It was bound to happen, sooner or later: Google's much-loved Gmail service has experienced its first bout of serious downtime for a sizable portion of its user base. Yesterday, a significant number of Google users experienced between 8 and 12 hours of downtime, causing a number of users to flock to the Google help forums. While the service appears to be back up for those users, Google has provided little information on the cause of the downtime. Email is one thing but enterprise applications are another; considering that Google is now an enterprise player, these sorts of problems will have to be sorted out, if the company is to compete with desktop software. While a number of small businesses rely on Gmail, imagine if you didn't have access to not only email but also your word processor, spreadsheet software and calendar. Google Apps For Your Domain has a Service Level Agreement that guarantees 98 percent uptime--but you may be dismayed to learn that even 12 hours does not constitute two percent of the month of March.

For more on the downtime:
- see this ZDnet article