And unlike Gmail, the Pentium 3 in your closet can never go down :)

This issue isn't really that the service is down. From the perspective of the "help desk", the issue at the moment seems to be that the help desk is now "helpless desk", which an awkward situation to be in. Earlier, I e-mailed my University help desk since at the time the Google Status page had not been updated. Now it has, so I know it isn't just me.

But unfortunately (though not unexpectedly), the help desk is just as much in the dark as I am. They can't tell me: who it affects, how widespread it is, when it will be fixed, or even what the issue is. I wonder if "large" companies or organizations that use Google Apps get better support or have priority support in some way to get such information.

Although, my account seems to be working again, so that's good to know.

You would be more in control of your holiday airliner trip if you were allowed to fly the plane instead of the qualified pilot, that might not be a good thing though.

Visibility of the issue is dependent on knowing what the problem is. When outages are only an hour to two long, would you rather the technician spend the time communicating the issue or fixing it? This problem exists whether your technician is working locally or as part of a cloud service.

And when it does go down, how long is it going to take you to get it back up and running?

It depends on why it went down.

Sounds good. Wanna host my email accounts? I need a slick web interface, first-class spam protection, smart filters, instant search and data protection. For free, of course.

And when that P3 finally kicks the bucket? Or a power outage/earthquake/insert problem of your choice happens? I'm happy knowing that if my gmail is down, there is an entire team of people working to fix it - with no effort on my part at all. Just keep a backup of your mail and this whole cloud thing ain't so bad (hopefully your mail is backed up anyway cloud or no).

Seems like sarcasm.