Where were you on the day GMail went down?

People often remember where they were on the day that momentous things happen in history; first man on the moon, JFK being shot, Princess Diana's car crash... that sort of thing.

That's all well and good for the big stuff (actually, was Diana's death really that big a deal?) but if you'd been following Twitter yesterday you would have though something similar had happened as a huge number of Tweets about one thing flooded the networks, something that seemed to excite and amuse some users and horrify others... the death of GMail!

Actually rumours of it's death are greatly exagerated since it came back online within a couple of hours but for a while there Twitter and the Blogosphere were buzzing with slightly nervous posts from users who couldn't access their email. Do a quick search on Twitter for #GFail to get a feel for it.

I pretty much run my life on Google's online services - they host my blog, my email, my calendar and contacts which sync to my iPhone, I use their blog reader, their photo sharing site Picasa and I also use their online bookmarks and search alerts to keep up-to-date on things.

So, in light of the Great Google Outage of 2009 should I be worried about being so reliant on one service? Google responded to the problems on their blog and everything seems ok now but I am wondering about spreading the load a little. I already use Flickr from rival Yahoo, along with an old Yahoo mail account so that's a bit of backup and delicious.com is probably better than Google's bookmarks but it's so nice and easy having everything in one place! Which is probably why there has been speculation around a monopoly investigation to determine whether it needs to divest some services.

I like it - I like the ease of use, the openness of their API and tools, the simple interface, everything! They just don't feel like Microsoft did when they were being attacked for their global coverage. Hopefully Google can recover from it's technical glitches and that their users will forgive them for being shown to be fallable like everyone else.