Gmail is one of the most popular webmail services in the world, not only among individual users but also as a component of Apps, which is designed for use by organizations of all sizes and educational institutions.

As such, Gmail outages are immediately felt worldwide, especially among people and companies that use it for business communications.

Google has said in the past that it provides the Gmail service to all types of users using the same infrastructure, which is why outages, no matter their scope, typically affect all types of users indiscriminately.

Gartner analyst Matt Cain believes this is a mistake on Google's part. "The critical issue for Google is to segment commercial Gmail traffic from consumer traffic," he said via e-mail.

"Google must prove that consumer and commercial services are largely independent of each other, and that the commercial services will sustain at least a 99.9 percent uptime, which is the standard for most commercial e-mail SaaS [software-as-a-service] services," Cain said.