lasts this long. It is frustrating to not be able to expedite these issues. I have to speak with the boss again and he's po'd (pissed off). This is considered a mission critical issue here. We may have to make other arrangements. Apparently Google mail is not very reliable. I think I would have pushed for something else before we switched if I had known the level of unreliability," he wrote.

Another administrator identified as Techlinks : "This outage has hit us pretty hard and we've been out of email for 24 hours and now business is suffering."

Google Apps is a suite of hosted collaboration and communication software and services designed for workplace use. Its Premier edition costs US$50 per user per year and includes a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for the Gmail service.

In August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Webmail service but also paying Google Apps Premier customers. As a result, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

"We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have," Google said a letter sent to Apps administrators at the time.