Los Angeles Public Relations

Millions of Internet users discovered that Google’s popular GMAIL service crashed a little after 1 pm PST, and it stayed down for upwards of an hour, with service mostly restored around 2:25 pm PST.  The glitch sent shock waves around the world, as GMAIL has become one of the most popular personal email services available, and many users think of Google as the gold standard for internet.  What made this particularly difficult timing is that Google had just launched a campaign aimed at convincing corporate users to switch from Microsoft products like Outlook over to Google’s hosted services for business.

For Google, who quickly posted a mia culpa on their blog, this was an embarrassing misstep, but, it also underscored the tremendous market share that it has garnered, as search engines across the web were choked by the number of searches trying to find out what was wrong with GMAIL.  Yahoo must be thrilled that its number one search today involved GMAIL.