Google's Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More
The most interesting tidbit in the SLA, which applies for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more (emphasis ours):
“Downtime Period” means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.
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“Monthly Uptime Percentage” means total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime suffered from all Downtime Periods in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.
True enough, this exempts Google from admitting it had up to 21 hours of downtime in one day (worst-case of course, see Pingdom’s calculation for more information about that as well a more likely scenario), because it ignores all unavailability under 10 minutes, which by today’s standards is a very long period even for free services (SLA applies only to paying customers, but still).
Google’s Apps SLA may guarantee 99,9% uptime, but this little loophole makes it darn easy for the company to honor that.