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Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I use FastMail (https://fastmail.com) for email and calendar rather than Google is that when outages happen, the explain what is going on (http://www.fastmailstatus.com). Outages are inevitable, so having (a) information and (b) the ability to contact a human are valuable features IMO.

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It seems to be down now? http://www.fastmailstatus.com/

So, Google fails so rarely that you just sold me on the idea of not changing! :)

I regularly contact humans at Google for support for my clients. Telephone rings, human operator picks up ... of course my clients are paying for their Google services, so if you're relying on the free version this doesn't (and shouldn't) apply.

Shouldn't?!

Google has explained what is going on:

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=84...

'Explained' may be a bit of an overstatement for that page. 'Acknowledged and provided timestamps' is more like it.

EDIT: Although it does look like they will update it with more information soon.

Interesting that the status page marks this as a 'service disruption' versus 'service outage'. The page doesn't have any definitions of these terms anyway, so it's hard to know what the difference is.

I was completely unable to access the service. It seems like a 'service outage' to me!

The difference might be that outage is down for all, disruption might be down for 50%.

They also just pushed out the invitation detecting thing that Google has had for quite a while that lets you add stuff to your calendar quickly. Sadly I still use Google's calendar despite having Fastmail because it's just a lot better.

You are probably looking for http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=847...

That doesn't _explain_ anything. Compare the level of detail to http://www.fastmailstatus.com.

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