Google Calendar Down Today

Anybody have trouble with Google Calendar today? I was unable to access my Google calendar account from around 2PM to 8PM Eastern time today

I searched Google News for any details but didn't find anything. I used Google Blog search to look for comments about it but came up empty there as well. During the downtime today when I attempted to access my online calendar I was directed to a page that said that the service was temporary unavailable, the message was repeated (I'm assuming it was the same message) in about 15 languages, I found one of them helpful.

On other attempts to load the page I was directed to a shorter message only in English that referenced a Google calendar support article in their knowledge base. The article explained three ways that the problem could be my fault and left me with no good options to figure out what was actually going on, or to get an update.

Now that my calendar is back online this evening there don't appear to be any notices or alerts inside the software about what occurred. Maybe they'll send me an email, if so I'll post it here when I get it.

During the downtime today I realized three things that surprised me:

1. I've become very reliant on my Google calendar. It's a free service so I have to realize that it won't always be available, or as available as a paid service that comes with a real business Service Level Agreement (SLA), but while it was down this afternoon five meeting invitations stacked up in my email inbox
2. Google didn't make any information about the outage readily available to me... either at my regular calendar URL, via email, or within their knowledge base. I guess Google doesn't feel the obligation to make that communication.
3. I'm really glad that I use Goosync to sync my Google calendar to my Palm Treo. I was able to check my calendar on my Treo during the outage but I didn't dare to try to sync it because I wasn't sure if it would erase all appointments from my Treo considering that whatever Goosync connects with at Google to make the integration was probably down too. In the event that my Google Calendar never came back it was nice to know my Treo would still have all of my critical information on it. Technically Google has absolutely no liability if my calendar had not come back.

I'm sure glad my Google Calendar is back up now. Time for me to get back to work managing the 29 meetings I have already scheduled this week.