It is intriguing what happens when your critical (but hosted) business service goes down.   What can you do?  In the old days, when the mail server went down, everyone could at least wander by the server room and see that the spare drive was being brought in and recovered, or in the worst case that nobody knew what happened yet, at least you could verify that somebody was sweating, laboring, working as hard as they could to rectify the problem, somebody you might have sat beside at the company picnic.

When a hosted service goes down, there is no sense that Fred in IT is having a bad day.  All you get to see is the error screen.  I’m sure that, in fact, there are any number of people having a very bad day right now on the Google campus – but I don’t know them, and I’m sure they couldn’t be bothered to know me.

There is literally nothing to be done.  Not by you, anyway.  You can’t “get to the bottom of it”.  Heads will not roll, at least not according to you.  Perhaps if you are a very, very big customer,  you might have an account manager to abuse, but really, what’s the point?  What are you really going to do, change services?

Nothing to do but go for ice cream, I reckon.  Patience is a virtue, but ice cream makes it go down easier.