Ignorant commenters
Typical ignorant responses. "What are you complaining for, it's free!". Well it's not "free" at all. Using Gmail represents an individual's investment in Gmail's capabilities. It has to be able to do the job and Google wants it to be able to do the job. And some users are paying for a service level and not receiving it. It remains to be seen what has happened in this case but the problem highlights one of communication - customers being able to reach Google, and Google being able to feed back to customers in a timely manner.
As for comments with the theme "Why do you trust Gmail?" again this is ridiculous. Making Google out to be a demon with ulterior motives is predictable and boring. They are a business and their objectives are fairly clear. Stop turning a service outage into some binary assessment of Google whereby they are either fine or else creepy and unreliable. It smacks of all the oh so old "M$" crap which STILL flies around to this day from individuals who have not a shred of business acumen, understanding of service delivery or experience of large scale infrastructure (your Netgear home router and iptables doesn't count as experience I'm afraid).
Finally I note that no-one has observed that while customers and Google should be able to communicate clearly, the onus is on the users to assess their email strategy and plan for contingency. This includes being able to route addresses elsewhere and access the content of mailboxes if Google's service is unavailable. It seems these users may not have done so. Perhaps a lesson will be learned, but quite possibly they will assess Google as being no good and move somewhere else, where of course they are destined to repeat their mistakes.
I use Google in a free and paid for capacity, I expect it to work, I expect a service level and communication from Google - and I plan for receiving none of these. It's your data people, and it's your job to look after it.