Following Ed Brills “VNUNet: What if Google Mail had been your corporate IT system?” post following the Google mail outage the other day I found it interesting, as a paying Google mail customer (for my private e-mail accounts), that I received an e-mail from Google during the night.
“Dear Google Apps customer,
Between approximately 9AM to 12PM GMT / 1AM to 4AM PST on Tuesday, February 24, 2009, some Google Apps mail users were unable to access their accounts. The actual outage period varied by user because the recovery process was executed in stages. No data was lost during this time. The root cause of the problem was a software bug that caused an unexpected service disruption during the course of a routine maintenance event. The root cause of this unexpected service disruption has been found and fixed.
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We will be extending a full 15-day SLA credit to all affected Google Apps Premier customers for the month of February. This credit will be applied to customer accounts automatically so there’s no action needed on the part of administrators.”
The e-mail goes on but at least they recognize that something went wrong…
If you go here http://www.google.com/appsstatus and drill down to the 25/2/2009 event you will get to the full incident report for the outage (http://www.google.com/appsstatus/ir/1nsexcr2jnrj1d6.pdf).