Google Calendar went down for "a significant subset of users" today, according to the Google Apps Status Dashboard. While the problem seems to have been resolved for now, Google hasn"t released any information as to why the outage happened or what steps they are taking to mitigate the risk of future outages.
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Cloud services like Google Apps are still a touchy subject for many. Trusting your data to a location other than local server space necessitates a trust relationship between cloud and user. That trust is based on the fact that the cloud won"t lose your data. A series of high-profile and wide-spread outages like the storage failure of T-Mobile"s Sidekick cloud servers and the Gmail outages of 2008 are causing more and more people to doubt the effectiveness and reliability of cloud services, and today"s Google Calendar will only fuel the the arguments against cloud services, and push people away from packages like Google Apps.