Gmail, which has something like 31 million users, went down again globally for two-and-half hours by Google's count on Tuesday, starting at around 9:30am GMT.

This time it was it was due to routine maintenance in one of its European data centers.

Rather than fall over to another data center, the way it's supposed to, because some newfangled code that tries to keep data physically close to the owner, it said, it overloaded the other data center, which "caused cascading problems from one data center to another."

Google's offered to compensate paying customers of its $50-a-year Google Apps package with its enhanced Gmail a 15-day extension on their contracts.

The smart money got around the blowout using IMAP and POP3 access to their Gmail accounts or worked offline if they could.