Earlier this week Google announced it had detected a problem that prevented Gmail users from accessing their accounts. Although Google said the bug affected only “a small number of users,” that was little comfort for Google Apps administrators who were fielding angry complaints from business users who actually pay for Google's email system.

The outage lasted about 30 hours and has since been fixed, but the company offered no explanation as to what caused the problem nor as to why it took them so long to repair. This is just the latest in a series of incidents that have affected Gmail, following a similar problem in August and a couple of lengthy outages back in 2006, which understandably has raised some questions among IT professionals about the efficacy of using SaaS solutions as a foundation for business communications.