• : Users went a full 30 hours without access. Google didn't elaborate on what caused the issue.

All Considered...

It may sound bad, but Gmail does appear to have a reasonable amount of uptime, all considered. Following last fall's series of outages, a Google rep that Gmail suffers only about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, giving it an average uptime rate of 99.9 percent. He noted that, according to some independent reports, on-premise e-mail systems tend to see twice the amount of offline time--anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, on average, every 30 days.

So, my final thought: Gmail was down. It was annoying. We're all (myself included) going to gripe about it for a few days, and we have every right to do so. But outages occur anywhere you go, and worse things could happen. In the end, Gmail's still a damn fine service, and--let's be honest with each other here--none of us is about to jump ship over this.