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.

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In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.

Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.

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Last week, Gmail failed – for the third time in recent months. Yet again, the media and blogosphere declared the end of hosted services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing as we know it.

Here’s why I disagree:

(Read on to get cloud computing expert Guy Rosen’s take on how the latest Gmail problems relate to the viability of cloud computing in general.)

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Gmail was down for an unknown amount of time today. Judging by the talk on Twitter some people were still having issues several hours after Google said the problem had been fixed.

This article is about managing user speculation, and the real-time, online discussion that inevitably follows.

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One of the latest software errors that had widely noticed consequences was Google’s Gmail outage in February. The problem in that case was, according to Google, a bug in the software that distributed load between its different data centers.

The Gmail outage only resulted in people not having access to their email for a few hours. No one got killed. Nothing exploded. It was an inconvenience, and while it was a significant inconvenience for some of Gmail’s users, it was still just that: an inconvenience.

This article is about some of the more dire consequences of software errors through the years. Incidents that make the Gmail outage seem rather trivial.

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If you missed that Google had a 2.5-hour Gmail outage yesterday, you were probably hiding under a rock, or possibly in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. Every major tech blog and news outlet was on it (not to mention Twitter users).

It was night-time in the US, which limited the impact there, but the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. For example, in Europe the outage started at 9:30 in the morning.

Google has now put a number on how much the potential productivity loss for Gmail users was worth.

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We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.

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Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.

It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.

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It has been widely reported that Google’s Gmail has been having problems lately. Now it seems like Microsoft perhaps had a hand in spreading the news coverage, fanning the flames a bit.

Here is a quote from an InformationWeek article about the recent Gmail outages:

That didn’t stop a Microsoft spokesperson from reaching out to me to make sure I was aware of the current Google Apps problems. The spokesperson said to me in an e-mail, “The Gmail outage was reported (and buried) on a discussion board yesterday and a solution is expected (but not promised) by EOD today — 24 hrs later.”

He implied that the story wasn’t getting the press that it should.

So, basically, Microsoft’s PR people are trying to make sure that Google’s trouble gets as much attention as possible.

We were curious if this happens a lot. Do companies often contact journalists to point out the failings of their competitors?

We fired off this question to Eric Zeman, the journalist at InformationWeek who wrote the article we quoted from above, and here is what he told us:

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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

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