Link: Official Gmail Blog: We feel your pain, and we're sorry. Yes, Google Apps was down again yesterday. I was impacted for about twenty minutes or so, based on my usage at the time, others were impacted more severely.
I believe that Google has their reputation on the line and therefore they obviously take any down time seriously as they should. The question is not will there be down time, but rather "how will your technology partner respond?"
If you are an MS shop, how many times has your Exchange Server gone down? Do you have a world class team working on the problem when it does? The answer to first question is probably yes often enough to have caused significant pain. The answer to the second question, for almost all firms, including "Big Law," is NO.
Yes you should be concerned with any Web 2.0 technology partner that you use. Absolutely. I am not going to risk my practice on a vendor that might be here today and gone tomorrow. But I remain confident (and quite pleased) with Google Apps, despite the fact that there has been downtime recently.
100% uptime is a myth. However, that is ultimately the objective, and Google will continue to work on the problem until they begin to approximate it. You can bet on it. I have.
