For the second time this year, Google and it's multitude of users suffered a service outage, this one affecting Gmail. Starting early in the morning on Tuesday, the webmail service started to get flaky for certain users, with outright outages for an undisclosed number of people. It affected only those making use of Google Apps, the web-based software suite Google has been maintaining for a little over three years, and apparently lasted less than an hour. Others may have been affected for longer. While not explaining exactly what happened, Google did mention that anyone who pays for the service would be compensated as usual.
Similar to the Gmail outage a few weeks ago, Google's response was to apologize. In both cases the fixes have been rapid, and the company has recently provided an App Status Dashboard to give users an indication of when problems have arisen. This problem, for instance, was reported on the dashboard with timelines on when they planned to have it fixed.