The thing is, it's not just the frontend. Gmail's backend has outtages, too. Often in conjunction with the frontend. Sometimes just the IMAP/POP goes down.

The thing is, it's not just the frontend. Gmail's backend has outtages, too. Often in conjunction with the frontend. Sometimes just the IMAP/POP goes down. In any of those situations, it'll be fixed eventually, but you have no support available to you to let you know what's up or to report issues to if its something only affecting your account. Google can easily pull the plug on any Gmail account they want. It says so right in the terms of service. You have no guarantee of service or access to your data. Even higher profile reporters have had access to all their Google data (gmail, calendar, contacts, documents, google drive, etc) disabled for having what appeared to be client payment data in a single Google doc. They were only able to restore it after a few days because they had some connections.