A Google Apps outage that occurred earlier this month concerned a lot of people. Users of the Premier Edition were paying for the service, and 15 hours of downtime and questionable communication is not good, regardless. So now Google’s unveiling a free extension of service and the way in which it will handle any future problems.
As explained in an email from the Google Apps Team, the extension of service amounts to a full 15 days that will automatically be applied to Premier Edition accounts. Most users should see 15 days of uptime as a fair trade for the equal number of hours they were inconvenienced.
Then comes the keep-people-in-the-loop development. Dave Rosenberg reports that the Team stated, “We’re building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage: A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact,” and “[a] continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution.”
Any users needing extra details will have the option of receiving a comprehensive incident report, and even phone calls, once everything’s resolved.
It would be interesting to know whether it took Google 20 days to cook all this up or the move is a slow response to some wave of rejection. Either way, though, it looks like the company is acknowledging its problem and trying to prevent a repeat.
