google apps

Google now provides users of its suite of hosted applications with a way to quickly check the status of Google Apps services. The new Google Apps Status Dashboard tells you whether a given Apps service is down for everyone, or just for you. A very timely launch by Google, after a couple of hours of Gmail outage nearly caused an online panic yesterday.

Google has extended the Service Level Agreement for the paid edition of its online productivity suite to offer 99.9% availability. Strictly speaking, the "three nines" uptime guarantee translates to less than 9 hours of service interruption per year, total, but Google's calculation of uptime will disregard outages shorter than 10 minutes. Read on for details.