It confirmed that a “small subset of users” have been affected by the latest downtime, but didn’t provide a definitive number and could not confirm when the service would be back up and running.

“The team is working as quickly as they can to resolve the problem,” said Google in a statement. “We know how important e-mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

In the meantime affected users can, once again, stare at this status page and keep hitting the refresh button until Google brings Gmail back to life for its 113m user base.

Just last month Google was forced to apologise after Gmail suffered a major collapse when some of the firm’s data centres in Europe failed to cope with a routine maintenance event.

Original article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/10/gmail_outage/

Firstly it is still in Beta testing mode – this means you have no service level agreement with Google. They can take the whole system down without warning, meaning guess what…..none of your staff can work! They also state in the terms and conditions when you signup that they cannot guarantee the safety of your data and are free to use your data for marketing purposes if they please. Brilliant!

Once you are in, you’re locked in - People for years have complained that they are locked into Microsoft’s software stack. Well if you start using Google Apps you’re now in a similar situation! Any smart company should put in place a plan for the future. What if you come to realise you didn’t want to host your application on the Google App Engine anymore? Good luck, almost everything you are given access to is proprietary — that means all your data is locked into a format that isn’t like a traditional relational database. This could turn into a disaster for your business if you rely on a custom built app.

It’s free right? Errr…. - Well, ok so for a small business the attraction of a free suite of office applications and a way to stay your documents and collaborate with clients/colleagues can be very tempting. However what happens when something goes wrong? Do you think Google has a call centre full of support staff to help? Well the answer is NO. You can pay more for additional support but this was supposed to be free right? Check out this genuine response to a support request;

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to send us your message. This is an
auto-response with admin support resources. You won’t receive a response
from a member of our team.

To learn more about Google Apps, please visit the Help Center at
http://www.google.com/support/a, or by clicking ‘Help’ in your control
panel.

Many administrators are also finding quick and accurate information from
the Google Apps Help Discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/hosted.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Thanks for that oh wonderful Google. Choosing a ‘Cloud’ IT provider like www.spidergroup.com means you have dedicated support staff waiting to fix any problem you might encounter. You get a defined service level agreement and the knowledge that you are as important as the next client, and will never be ignored!

Some of Google’s problems already;

http://www.macworld.com/article/57017/2007/03/googleapps.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/130187/google_apps_gmail_faces_downtime_problems.html