The reports I am reading say anyone with a period in their e-mail address will have outgoing mail rejected by SMTP server, if you are using a mail client that sends via SMTP.
Not attacking Google here, but why can't a company with the insanely vast resources as Google, prevent something like this? I can understand a small provider going down occasionally, but Google should have enough engineers on this to have redundancy and robustness across their networks.
Hire all of the people that you want, but if you give any of them the kind of access required to actually do anything, all it takes is one person's error to blow the whole dam.