Google's Gmail Experiences Worldwide Crash

Google's Gmail online e-mail service ran out of juice Tuesday morning for users in Europe and possibly worldwide.
British users noticed Gmail conked out around 10:30 local time, or 5:30 a.m. EST.
Reports came in from the U.S. that it had stopped working there as well. Tests in New York revealed intermittent service.
Google technicians were "working on it," according to a report in the Times of London.
"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users," read a posting in a GMail help forum.
"The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."
Twitter predictably went into overdrive, with European users complaining about the outage and a few others taking a longer perspective.
"3 hours without #Gmail. If that means crisis for you, check your reality," wrote a Dutch journalist with the Twitter handle mmarjoleiN. "Dependence is a bitch."
The outage exposed the underlying vulnerability of "cloud" computing, in which applications and data are accessed by users on the Internet instead of their own hard drives.
Google has been trying to sell its cloud-based Google Apps service to businesses for a couple of years, with notable success in getting some companies to switch to Gmail from Microsoft's Outlook.
Microsoft, never one to be left behind, has been promoting its similar Windows Live service.
But there's always one problem with cloud computing. If the central servers, or your Internet access, go down, you're dead in the water, as a few British businesses seem to have found this morning.

via FoxNews