In theory, but never in practice.

The big kicker that makes it impractical is that most businesses and government organizations use GMail. There's so much money and power out there that would pressure Google into fixing it immediately. If they seriously tried it would be endless, endless lawsuits about all the lost productivity, valuable company information, etc.

If Google made their intentions clear, I bet it wouldn't stay down for more than 3 days before they relented due to all that pressure.