outage

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.

The Planet's Houston datacenter went offline late Saturday afternoon, after an explosion knocked down walls at an electric equipment room. Reports are that approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 clients are affected. The company expects to have operations on the second floor of the facility restored today; the first floor has sustained more serious damage.