Gmail uptime

My manager at BigFix was having a discussion with our CFO about Gmail uptime (in the context of our email infrastructure uptime.)

Using this as a data source:
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

and selecting Google Mail and Postini Services at the items to measure, he arrives at this:

Date	Service	Duration	Reason
4/9/2010	Postini	2:24	Unspecified Emergency Maintenance
4/7/2010	Core Gmail	11:20	HTML mode email down for "a small number of users"
4/2/2010	Postini	2:08	Failed Postini update
3/16/2010	Core Gmail	9:51	Inbound/Outbound Email was not routing
3/15/2010	Core Gmail	4:38	Users unable to access gmail accounts
3/10/2010	Core Gmail	0:50	Users unable to access gmail accounts
3/8/2010	Postini	0:29	Anti-Spam not anti-spamming
3/4/2010	Postini	0:58	Anti-Spam not anti-spamming
2/25/2010	Postini	7:46	Users unable to send email
		40:24

Total runtime (2 services) 2304
48 days, 24 hrs day, 2 services

Effective uptime
98.24%

I have not done my own math here to verify, just thought it would be interesting to share. Note that he gives them twice as many runtime hours since he's counting two services. I would tend to halve that, resulting in double the downtime percentage.

I thank Google for publishing their outage information, by the way.

Just a data point for the next time someone is asking you for more nines than is reasonable.