Google: Gmail Uptime Just Fine, Thanks

In a post on Google's official blog, Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise, noted that Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time.

"The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008," Glotzbach wrote in the blog.

He notes that if you average all the data across the entire Gmail service, it accounts for an aggregate 10 to 1 5 minutes of downtime per month over the last year.

"That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry," he wrote.

Google cites research firm Radicati Group, which says companies with on-premise e-mail solutions average from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.

"Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves," Glotzbach wrote. "And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity."

In the same post, Google extended Google's 99.9 percent service level agreement to the other applications in Google Apps, which include Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk.

"More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size—even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003 percent of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago—attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We've made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups," Glotzbach wrote.

If Google's monthly uptime percentage falls between 99.0 percent and 99.9 percent, Google will add three days of service to the end of the service term for free. If the uptime is between 95.0 percent and 99.0 percent, seven days are added. For service levels below 95.0 percent, Google will add 15 days of extra service at no charge.

"Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud's promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost," Glotzbach wrote.