Citing that article looks like you're grasping at straws trying to find something wrong with Google. It's from two years ago and clearly specifies in the opening that a small number of users were affected. Microsoft's services went out for everyone, and today.

If you're going to suggest Google has similar difficulties, you might be 100% right, but you should point to a more relevant, recent article. A Mail system going offline two years ago for a small number of users is very different.

The article also links to other outages. Partial outages are frequent enough that they don't make news anymore and Google has a dashboard interface that shows them here:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

The relevant context is that cloud services go down. There's nothing straws about that. Amazon experienced a large issue recently as well:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clou...

Docs has been down twice in the last two weeks during business hours. 9/7 it was down for about an hour, and 8/26 the Docs listing was down for about two hours (the listed time on the 26th is about an hour after we submitted the issue).

Google docs might have not gone down for everyone, but when we used it, twice we had instances where entire documents got nuked. Eventually two week old backups were restored, which was essentially useless for the type of documents they both were.

Google Docs was down for over an hour just two days ago when they were yapping about switching to the cloud to save energy and announcing offline apps.

the article you linked to was from 2 years ago. i guess you are saying microsoft is 2 years behind? google apps had 99.984% uptime last year. on pace for over 4 9's this year, including planned downtime. microsoft is the newbie here, and judging from their first few months, it is a long and winding road before they iron out the kinks in their cloud.

Look at your comments, you have some bias against Microsoft and Google.

Does Microsoft issue automatic downtime credits?