Gmail lights go out: 15 days free payback

Google has offered customers the equivalent of $2.05 per user in compensation after Gmail suffered an outage on Tuesday.

For Google Apps Premier Edition, customers who pay the $50 per user per year price for the Google Apps service, Google aims to keep it up and running 99.9 per cent of the time each month. According to the Google Apps service level agreement (SLA), Google promises three extra days of service if availability slips down to between 99 and 99.9 per cent.

According to a blog posting by Gmail site reliability manager, Acacio Cruz, the outage lasted "approximately two and a half hours" - meaning the uptime delivered was approximately 99.6 per cent.

However, Google decided to extend affected customers' service more than the three days the SLA required. A spokesman for Google said in a statement: "Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill, we are extending their service for 15 days." Ordinarily the service has to slip below 95 per cent uptime to provide a 15-day extension.

At $50 per year, Google charges a rate of 0.57 cents per hour. So a three-day extension is the equivalent of 41 cents of revenue per user, and a 15-day extension is worth $2.05.

On another blog post on Tuesday, Google's Cruz offered this explanation: "This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European datacentres. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another datacentre.

"Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another datacentre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one datacentre to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."

Original article: Google Gmail outage compensation: $2.05 per user from CNET News.com