Backupify Weighs In on Google Apps Outage

Some Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Apps users experienced some downtime frustration on Wednesday morning when several different Google cloud applications suffered a service disruption. Gmail, Drive, Groups and several other Google Apps were having difficulties, and the Google admin control panel and API went down entirely. And on its blog, Backupify noted it was experiencing issues with Google, but it also provided a list of five reasons for backup (think of it as a sales pitch).

“While Google is normally very reliable, this is a clear instance that shows they are not entirely perfect. And while we are confident that in the long-run, we will get our data back, right now we can’t access any of our Gmail, Google drive, Google docs, calendar, contacts, or sites,” wrote Backupify’s Tania Pylyp on the blog.

Pylyp is right, in that it doesn’t seem that frequent that Google experiences service disruptions. Perhaps it’s just perception, but it seems like some of the other big guys go down more frequently. Regardless of whether it deserves the blame, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services is generally the cloud provider that end users and industry pundits wag their fingers at (and we’ve done our own share of finger-wagging) when the topic of downtime comes up.

Google isn’t without its outages, though. One very critical one was the October outage of Google App Engine—the cloud service that was never supposed to go down. The company was quick to admit the error and beg forgiveness, even if it did take hours to get the service back to being ship-shape.

Cloud outages will continue, of course. No technology is without its downtime. But Backupify took the opportunity to outline the need for backup services like its own, because when the cloud provider you or your customers use goes down, it puts a lot of important business data out of reach. A backup service would fix that.