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Update: Google says sorry about the GMail outage. That’s good enough for me. Here is what Todd Jackson, GMail product manager had to say on the company blog.

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.

Original post below the fold.

It’s almost becoming routine, these outages at Google’s Gmail service. After we reported last week that there were some problems with Google Apps, today a much bigger outage hit Google’s email service, taking down the entire system, it seems.

Given that our company relies on Google’s Gmail and GTalk service, our operations came to a standstill this afternoon. We aren’t a large company but the losses are very real, especially in productivity. I wonder how the big customers of Google — folks like Sanmina-SC — are dealing with this e-blackout.

If an outage of this magnitude can strike Google, the company with a fearsome infrastructure, I wonder who — if any — can plan for the worst. I guess it’s time to stop picking on Twitter, which was fast becoming synonymous with the word “outage.” In fact, in recent weeks, not only Google’s services but those of Amazon’s S3 and Apple’s MobileMe have gone on the blink, leading us to rethink our assumptions about the reliability of the web as a platform. Clearly a lot of work still needs to be done.

How is your workday being impacted by Gmail outage? Share your stories with us.

Photo courtesy of Kyle May via Flickr.

A few months ago, at the insistence of some of my team members, we switched from Zimbra to Google Apps for our own domain offering. The argument was that Google’s quality of service, thanks to its great infrastructure, would be great and that we could also use Google Docs for easy sharing of information.

And since everyone on the team (barring me) loved the Gmail interface, I acquiesced to their wishes. I shouldn’t have. Six months later we are getting frustrated by schizrophrenic nature of the Google Mail system. At the time, these ideas looked like they were all such great ideas in theory — but six months later we are all experiencing all sorts of problems with Google Mail.

Messages are either not getting sent or being lost by the system. Several people have complained about not receiving replies, even after we have sent them back. The mail system hangs up and you keep waiting for something to happen. And don’t get me started on the sub-par IMAP features of the system. How is one supposed to run a business on such an unreliable platform? The integration of Google’s services remains a distant dream, reminding us of the limitation of its competence beyond search and advertising.

And in order to get support we would need to upgrade to a premium version of the service that could set us back by $1,200 a month year. I don’t mind paying, but if their recent track record is any indication, I might as well light a cigar with 12 $100 bills. For the longest time I though we were the only ones with this problem. Apparently not. At least two other friends with startups who are using Google Apps for their domain are finding similar issues.

That is why I feel terrible for those 1.5 million Australian school kids who will now have to use Gmail instead of Exchange/Outlook. In some ways it’s like jumping from fire into the frying pan (being heated in that fire.)

Are you experiencing those issues as well? Go ahead and kvetch in our comments!