Google’s hosted office suite Google Docs has been down for more than 30 minutes, rendering documents inaccessible and users frustrated. Short outages are not uncommon, but as the downtime extends this morning it seems a good time to ask – how long is too long for you? At what point would you personally deem a web service too unstable to use, and presuming that varies from service to service, what’s your requirement for Google Docs?
Update:After 45 minutes of downtime, Google Docs appears to be back up.
While microblogging service Twitter has become the poster child of down time, few people rely on constant uptime from Twitter to do their business. Google Docs may be different, however. A growing number of people do business on Google Docs – should they?
Twits tweeting about Google Docs downtime, from Twitscoop.
To be fair it appears that Google Docs has only gone down longer than a few minutes a few times since the service launched. The service is generally very reliable, the collaboration features are useful and it’s free for consumer use. If those few service outages cost your company a substantial amount of money or inconvenience, that may be too much down time though.
On the other hand, maybe serious business never had any place on Google Docs in the first place. What do you think?
We appreciate your input; this is an important question and reading your replies will give us something to do while we wait for access to our docs to return. We probably should have enabled Google Gears.
