Just as I was starting to extol the virtues of Google docs as a very functional replacement for Office, this happens!

Now it strikes me that 99.99% uptime is pretty good, and in fact we've all had 'down time' with offline files too. For example opening files over network shares, file corruption, file versions etc. The most frustrating problem when a service like Google Docs goes down is that you don't know what the problem is and you don't know how long it will be down for. Right now I need to know if I should go back to Excel for the purpose of preparing my report for my meeting at 12.

What would help is if there was a phone number you could call to find this information out. But of course Google docs is a free service so I can't expect them to offer phone support.

That I think is the crux of the issue - when cloud services go down you still need to communicate properly with customers. The question is can a free service ever do that effectively?

[Update: Google docs was down for about 10mins in total. Not that long in the scheme of things. Just long enough to write a blog article though....]