What is it that the Los Angeles Times saying about the Google down time?
By David Sarno September 2, 2009 Google Inc.’s Gmail electronic mail platform went off-line Tuesday for more than an hour, prompting an outcry from tens of thousands of users and reminding consumers that the Mountain View, Calif., company is not immune from widespread outages. “Gmail is down & everyones having panic attacks,” wrote Anna B., a Twitter user in Los Angeles. “Including myself.” Later in the day, Google said it fixed the problem and was investigating the cause. Gmail is the third-most-visited e-mail service, with nearly 37 million unique visitors, according to ComScore Inc. Many of Google’s services exist in what is known as the cloud, a style of computing that allows users to run Google programs through the Web rather than from their hard drives. That means the company’s business and reputation depend on services’ being available without interruption. Because the problem persisted for more than 10 minutes, the outage met Google’s own definition of a “downtime period,” a de
