Site issues come in all shapes and forms, and no one seems immune. Google’s Gmail problems the last couple of days, where a number of Gmail users temporarily lost all of their emails, was proof that Murphy’s Law is alive and well on the Internet.

However, this post is not really about that specific incident, but rather about an interesting detail in the way Google communicated the problem.

Oops, but only 0.02% are affected

In their official account of the incident, Google was very careful to point out (twice) that only 0.02% of all Gmail users were affected. No mention of how many users that corresponded to.

[...] Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. [...]

In fact, during the entire conversation about the incident, Google consistently used percentages, never once mentioning in absolute numbers how many Gmail users were affected (at least we didn’t see any).

So the focus in Google’s communication was to point out that tiny little fragment of a percent. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

A matter of scale

To realize why this was a clever move, you first need to know how big Gmail is: Gmail supposedly has around 200 million users. It’s a huge email service.

A thin slice from a huge pie will still be significant, and even a mere 0.02% turns out to be a large chunk. In this case, it corresponds to 40,000 users.

40,000 affected users sounds a lot worse than 0.02%, doesn’t it? The latter gives a much more positive spin. “We’re having trouble, but only a tiny share of our users are affected.”

Which is of course why Google didn’t mention any absolute numbers. This was a company in damage control mode.

It’s actually a pretty smart (but not very transparent) approach for any big service, because even tiny shares of a huge user base will number in the thousands. Even “small” incidents will look bad if actual user numbers are discussed.

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Just a couple of weeks ago we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, reaching 17.5 Mbps in the latest report by Akamai, covering Q4 2011.

Now we take a look at where in the world Internet speeds have grown the fastest over the last four and a half years. It may surprise you, which countries actually made it onto the list.

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Twitter can be scanned quickly. Tweets are bite-sized and take mere seconds for users to process. Instagram is pretty much Twitter for images, where entries can also be scanned in mere seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long.

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Simply, we know many sysadmins use iPads (and other types of tablets as well) in the daily work. So, to inspire you, we have tested a bunch of apps for iPad that we think you will find interesting.

After a rigorous selection-process (and input from our Twitter followers), we can now present to you 10 great iPad apps for sysadmins.

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If you list the top 100 sites in the world (according to Alexa), you’ll find that 23 are owned by Google. That’s a massive share for a single company.

How does Google have such a huge presence? The main reason is the large number of localized versions of Google Search, such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.de, etc. Almost every country has one, and due to their popularity, 17 are among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

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