Google Apps Suffering Downtime; Refund Coming?
ComputerWorld has an article about trouble some users and organizations had accessing their Google Apps services recently. According to the article, this was the third time this month the service suffered downtime, this time on Tuesday of this week from 10:00 am to about 4 pm. There was a previous outage on March 12 for about two hours, and another on March 1 for at least 8 hours. Paid users of the Premier tier of service received an extra 15 days of free Premier service.
Premier users are guaranteed 99.9% uptime, which I have mentioned earlier translates to 43.829 minutes per month. Adding up ComputerWorld’s three reported outages, Google has had at least 16 hours of downtime in just the first month of the current version of Apps, the first to come with the uptime guarantee for paying users.
Ignoring the fact that 16 hours of downtime a month, from a service that could be used to provide corporate email, calendaring, web pages, documents and spreadsheets, is an unacceptable option for any organization with important work to do, these numbers mean Google only had uptime of 97.8096%. Every time Google exceeds that 43 minute number, it will be forced to give another free month (or 15 days for 22 minutes) to paid users, completely defeating the purpose of charging for Google Apps.
In fact, if Google can’t get their uptime under control, you could use Google Apps Premier completely for free! Obviously, this is something they have to fix, because bad uptime makes you look terrible, and it gives away your service for free, taking away any hope of profit. I’m hoping Google is finding ways to fix this, because making an uptime guarantee is a serious deal, and thus far, they’ve failed.
Did Google ever specify over what period of time their uptime guarantee should be calculated?
Since it appears to be a yearly payment, I say it should be calculated over an entire year, not just a single month. Even though I really think Google should have to emphasize this.
Comment by Tim | March 30, 2007