i love how they keep mentioning "0.02%" so you think it's some insignificant number, but it's actually something like 150,000 accounts.
I'd argue that is an insignificant number.
This winter was pretty bad here in the US. More people (and much higher percentage of some company's user bases) lost power for longer periods of time in freezing temeratures.
More people die in a single day than the people who temporarily lost email access.
Sure, It'd suck in that period where I thought I lost all my emails, but all's well that ends well. Lets keep things in perspective. This was more of a "SHIT THE CABLE'S OUT" issue than a serious life changing problem for anyone affected.
And the bounces didn't stop until the end of the working day on Monday on the east coast.
Secondly, the login message was "Your account has been disabled". If I could log in, and there was a message that my email was being restored from backup because they had a failure - fine. That wasn't the case. They had disabled my Google Apps Administrator account (same account as my email), email was bouncing, and I couldn't log in to my email OR the administration interface. The "reset your password" and "unlock your account" links failed to unlock it.
Comparing an email outage to people's deaths is poor form. Of course they aren't the same. That doesn't make it an issue when email is a super important communication tool.
But your boarder point still stands - the OP may well be a paying customer and he did not indicate he was using the free edition.
I have 2 opposing feelings on the matter; 1 is that email is not backup. If you're using it as such, well, you run this risk. Email is a communication medium; if ideas or information presented therein are important to you, save them in appropriate places. Email is only a way to get the idea/info TO you, not where to keep it. And yes, I realize reasonable people disagree here.
The other is that at least with Google, the account is intimately tied to any Android devices you have. I've heard reports of people not being able to use large swaths of functionality on their phones or tablets due to them being in that insignificant number. That would make the suck possibly an order of magnitude or more worse.
"As of November 2010, [gmail] had 193.3 million users monthly"
Not nothing, but not a lot either. My company has an exchange server for 200 or so people, and at any one point there are probably one or two people who are waiting for a password reset, errors with Calendar, public folder permissions errors, or other human error on the part of the helpdesk interns. That's a 100x increase from Google's error rate in this scenario, but it's perfectly acceptable within the context of our organisation.
That's why we have tape backups (which can take some time / effort to restore from). I think the difference is that if a user at my company has a problem they can call a human being and be told that someone is working on it, but with Google you can't do that.
> No accounts or emails were deleted
This is not true. During the affected time period, those accounts could not receive email, and sent out permanent failure bounce messages. If you were one of the affected and you were sent an important email during that time... You didn't get it, and you might never get it.
What alternative is online 24x7, with no downtime for backups, upgrades or power failures?
Does on-premise Exchange do better? Lotus Notes? sendmail?
Unlike Hotmail, I think a very large percentage of Gmail accounts are pretty active.
I think the word "tape" tells you all you need to know about how serious this issue is.