Google corporate user "demanding serious answers" over mail outage

Loss of Gmail service affected business users too

Google is growing its corporate email users

Guardian News & Media (GNM), one of Google’s key corporate users in the UK, will be “demanding answers” from the search firm over the loss of its online email service yesterday.

GNM has already switched away from Microsoft Office on local PCs to Google Apps for a wide range of uses, and has plans to go further – ditching Lotus Notes for Google Mail by the end of this year after completing the move of 2,400 users to the online word processing and calendars function.

Google’s mail service crashed for several hours yesterday, and GNM technology director Andy Beale said the timing was not great.

“Its less than ideal just before we start our pilot and we'll be obviously demanding some very detailed answers from Google,” he said.

“We do have a service level agreement with them and I think they will have breached it this month with this outage.”

Beale said the key question will be what caused the Google Mail crash.

“I think I will defer worrying until I have that explanation from Google - nothing is 100 per cent perfect, but if the problem was caused by a process failure then this is of concern to us,” he said.

“I suspect Google's overall uptime figures will still beat the majority of internal mail systems.”

Independent consultant Peter Thomas, a former head of enterprise IT at Chubb Insurance, said Google needs to be wary of the impact of service loss on corporate users.

“Mail outages happen. Perhaps they happen more in corporate environments if you allow for the number of mail users that Google supports. Last year I suffered a three day mail outage in a corporate environment, rather ironically relying on Gmail at the time,” he said.

“Maybe of greater concern to Google is the potential impact of problems like this on their move to provide corporate mail via the Gmail platform. I’m sure their availability meets or exceeds that of most in-house mail systems, but problems like this create the wrong impression.”