Beta Indeed

Gmail was down for two and a half hours a few days ago. It didn't matter much here in the States, as it was the middle of the night. But in Europe, it hit during the workday. Companies who use Gmail accounts for their primary work addresses were incommunicado. Those who use Google's online apps for word processing and spreadsheets were equally SOL. Now Google has explained what happened. Basically a conflict between maintenance at one data center and testing new code at another. My first reaction was "what the hell are they doing testing code in a production environment?!?" Then I remembered that little "Beta" under the Gmail logo. (And that they probably needed to take a whole center offline for the testing.) Sure made this guy look pretty prescient, though.