Google's Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for a lot of people - including Google corporate.

There were also reports of Google Apps Premium Edition and Google Talk being down. Apparently it's not the same network that Google runs its business on even though Google says it is. Ditto Apple's MobileMe Mail, which suffered an outage not long ago, and LinkedIn.

A few weeks ago Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and its Simple Storage Service (S3) were down. Ditto Google's Documents and Spreadsheets.

And last week Citrix' GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar were unavailable for a while.

There's a moral in here somewhere.