Over 113 million people discovered today that they were unable to access their email if it was held by Google. The reason was simple, Google Mail suffered a major blackout. The actual downtime varied but was roughly 4 hours on average, from 9.30am (GMT) to lunchtime.
Not only were private, personal accounts unavailable, as more than a million business around the world use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail, they were hit hard too.
In fact, Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.
So, there is a lesson in there somewhere. No matter how much you want to kill off your competition, it might be an idea to create a fail-safe account with them so that when your system crashes and burns you can still get the message out and about to let others know what is happening.
Expect to see microsoft@googlemail.com, apple@hotmail.com and google@apple.com soon!
