As a result, people couldnt access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldnt be routed to a Gmail server.

IMAPPOP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests dont use the same routers.He says the Gmail engineering team was alerted of the failures within seconds, and they addressed the problem. Read Treynors post for the technical details. Google says they have turned their full attention to preventing this kind of thing in the future, and will be working hard over the next few weeks to implement reliability improvements. They then threw that 99.9 number around again, saying, Gmail remains more than 99.9 available to all users.