clipped from www.slate.com

Gmail went down on Tuesday afternoon for a little more than an hour and a half. Were you terribly put out?

Moreover, was there anyone, anywhere, who couldn't immediately work around the failure using another e-mail service, Twitter, IM, Facebook, or the phone? With so many other ways to connect to people these days, downtime on any one communications system is rarely more than a minor annoyance.

Gmail never has planned outages (engineers work on the system while it's up), and its unplanned outage time is far shorter than that of in-house business e-mail, which typically sees about 40 to 90 minutes of downtime per month

After all, think of all the points of failure that stand between you and your e-mail: Your power could fail, your home broadband could go on the blink, your computer or router or iPhone could self-destruct

Gmail was down for just an hour and a half? Somebody give them a medal.