Of course Gmail being down is not good news for Google’s business (directly nor indirectly), but if you’re a giant computer manufacturer directly retailing products online across the globe, I’d wager you’re a bit worse off when your website is completely unavailable.

At least for the past half hour (since 5 PM EST), Dell.com has been suffering from a serious outage. Just for your reference, the company saw sales of $12.76 billion last quarter, and that was down 22% from $16.43 billion a year ago. Rest assured every minute of downtime is costing the computer manufacturer serious money.

Update: site is back up as from 5:40 PM EST

Are the two events related and are we experiencing yet another massive DDoS attack, or is this merely coincidental?