Apparently the Gmail outage was due to a problem in their code.  Accordingly to  Gmail official blog,  the code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner, was unable to deal with a routine maintenance in one of  Google European datacenters.

We easily accept that this kind of code can be very complex, and also, that could be very difficult to track its bugs.  Nevertheless, I think that problems like this one, and also the one that occurred  last month, can  be damaging to the Cloud’s reputation. So, it’s important that Cloud techs work hard to reduced these situations as  much as possible.

We must also continue the work in technologies like Gears or HTML5. If I had activated the off-line support on Gmail, released by Google last month,  I would’ve been able to continue accessing my emails. Consequently, problems like this one wouldn’t be so important.