I wonder if there's a "rolling brownout" in google applications today?

Earlier in the morning google reader (generally a really decent app to have around) was hanging, going into eternal "loading" screens (see below).

Since all of my blog / news feeds go through google reader (for now), I decided to switch gears and go research something. Except that google search was down as well.

Suspecting my own machine or net connection I tried gmail ... and it was working fine. So were a number of non-google services. Hmmm.

A Rolling Brownout?

A couple of hours later the tables were turned. Same machine, same browser (really crazy, exotic stuff - macbook pro, firefox, etc.). Search was back up, the reader was fine, but gmail was down. I got this several times in a row.

and then this:

Gmail just started working again for me, half a day before the first outages. I have no idea how widespread this / was, if it's really solved, nor even any idea why (other than it is very likely to be in the google "cloud").

But that's not really the point.

Enterprise SaaS

I have adapted my daily workflow to rely (in part) on some common SaaS offerings, and right now that's not working out too well. Maybe that's ok for an ad-supported offering in 2007 (especially if it's eternally beta!), but how about the enterprise?

Would this level of (un)reliability be good enough for you?

Hope not ... we can most definitely do better.