Oops ...
In the article:
"The company said it was investigating reports of disruption to its service and claimed that only 0.007 per cent of its users - which would amount to millions of people - were affected by Gmail and other online properties going titsup."
Let's assume that just 2 million people were affected. If they represent 0.007 per cent of Google's users, that would mean that their user base amounts to approximately 285,000,000,000 people. As the population of the Earth is around 7,000,000,000, there must be an awful lot of Zillons from the planet Tharg signed up to Google Apps as well.