Gmail and GFail

A few days ago Gmail was unavailable for a few hours and many people were outraged. I understand the pain of not being able to access email but was all the criticism really justified? Are people holding Google to unrealistic expectations? Are the standards too high? What is the actual impact of not having email for 2 or 4 hours?

I believe in the age of the cloud there will be many very public service interruptions. I would not consider Email a trivial service, particularly not for Gmail's size. However, there are already many more complex applications starting to become available. What can we realistically expect in terms of Service Level Agreements?

I believe these new applications will have to offer many alternatives to handle exceptions when something goes wrong, particularly when there is little control over the component that fails. Nevertheless businesses and individuals will have to put in place processes in place to mitigate some of these risks.