Google Gmail outage compensation: $2.05 per user

So...did anyone notice a lack of response from Google's mail service, Gmail, yesterday? Firstly it seemed the whole internet connection was slow, but I soon realised it was Gmail, and Gmail only!....at a time i needed to use it!

If your business used Gmail and the service went out for two and a half hours, do you think you lost $2.05 per user in productivity?

That's the monetary equivalent of what Google offered to compensate Google Apps Premiere Edition customers after Gmail was unavailable for about two and a half hours on Tuesday. And it was being generous: All it had to offer was the equivalent of 41 cents per user.

According to a Gmail outage blog posting by Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz, the outage lasted "approximately two and a half hours." By my math, assuming there were no other outages in February, that means uptime of 99.63 percent for the month.

Google offered an explanation of what happened on another blog post:
"This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center," Cruz said. "Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."

So here's hoping Google manage to keep on top of things. They provide one of the largest and most popular email services used by millions.