Google will offer 15 days of free service to paying customers who were cut off from their Google Gmail and Google Apps during the Feb. 24 service outage. While many use the free version of Gmail, a segment of enterprise customers and others pay $50 per year for an expanded version of Gmail and Google Apps.
Google
announced that it would offer 15 days of free service to paying subscribers who
were inconvenienced by a Feb. 24 service outage.
Google
restored service, which cut out at 9:30 a.m. GMT, after a few hours. The
timing meant that users in parts of Europe and Asia
experienced the brunt of the outage, but customers in the United States
were also affected.
Those who pay $50 per year for Google Apps Premier Edition, which contains
extended features, will be given 15 days of free service as a "make good" of sorts.
"We will extend service level agreement credits to Google Apps Premier
Edition customers," Andrew Kovacs, a
Google spokesperson, said in an e-mail. "Since the service disruption
lasted a few hours, they are entitled to a three-day extension of service for the
month of February. Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill,
we are extending their service for 15 days."
Google has dealt with a few issues this week. In addition
to the e-mail outage, users of Google Talk found themselves
the
target of a phishing scam designed to trick them out of their user credentials.
The scam connected users to a phishing site called ViddyHo.
According to the
Associated Press, Google last
offered a 15-day credit to compensate for a Gmail breakdown in August 2008.
Google Apps Premier Edition,
which
was released in February 2007 and offers a host of desktop applications,
shows Google attempting to become the major SAAS (software-as-a-service) provider. In
addition to Gmail, the Premier Edition features Google Docs and Spreadsheets,
Google Calendar, Google Talk and a variety of expanded collaboration and
management features aimed at the enterprise.
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