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A game of word association would have to go on for quite some time before most people would put "Google Apps" and "Gmail" together with "outage."  The two services recently took a partial tumble, though, and the experience has left some of the affected users less than happy.

What makes this event more important than, say, a Twitter failure, is not only the real utility of Google Apps and Gmail, but the fact that a few affected users had paid for the services.  The Premier Edition of Google Apps costs $50 per user account per year.

 

The complaints that came about as a result can be seen in a thread within the Google Apps Discussion Group.  Although "Mark," a Google Apps Advisor, kept in touch with the group, a great deal of frustration is evident in some corners as the outage stretched to about 15 hours (yesterday afternoon through this morning) in length.

And here's a bit of irony for you: Juan Carlos Perez reports, "A day before this week's problem struck, Dave Girouard, president of Google's Enterprise unit, talked up Google Apps at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum.  Girouard said Google has big plans to aggressively expand the features and capabilities of the suite . . ."

The resumption of service did not appear to correspond with any upgrades, in case you were wondering.