The Abe Lincoln Law of Cloud Computing.

Cloud computing seems to be suffering from the same problem that has bedevilled previous "mainframe-ist" attempts to centralise the serving of ICT. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you can serve some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Google Gmail is a testament to that basic rule, and is partly down yet again. as C:Net notes:

Google Inc.'s Gmail e-mail service is down for an undetermined number of users, and while the outage has been partially fixed, some people could be locked out of their accounts for many more hours.

In its latest update about the problem, posted at around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, Google said that it could take between 24 hours to 36 hours to restore all affected accounts.

.......

About two weeks ago, Gmail suffered a major outage that affected many users worldwide and lasted for two and a half hours. Gmail also ran into problems several times in August and October of last year.

It doesn't help that compared to say Thunderbird the Gmail offline system is very clunky. I must say that this is also apparently a bigger issue for free web based services, I can't recall the last time my (Telco provided) email system went down.