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2 days ago, on Mon­day, Gmail went down for a lit­tle less than 2 hours. If you are work­ing for a small or medium busi­ness (SMB) and rely­ing on Gmail for email, that out­age was actu­ally a very, very good proof that you made the right choice. The rea­son ? You now ben­e­fit from the best helpdesk and sup­port services.

When Gmail first went down, a flurry of users in all time­zones started to spread the alert on Twit­ter and other social media. Within min­utes the Gmail team had been alerted and had in hands detailed reports on the scale of the out­age. It also had to deal with a pub­lic sit­u­a­tion, ie solv­ing the issue as quickly as pos­si­ble to avoid a tainted reputation.

The main rea­son why some busi­nesses avoid Gmail is the rel­a­tive uncer­tainty of what hap­pens in case of an out­age: how to com­mu­ni­cate with the Google giant and how to make them fix the mess. We now know that the ecosys­tem formed by the SMBs, Google and real-time and pub­lic tools like Twit­ter behave much like a dis­trib­uted helpdesk medi­at­ing the flow of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the dif­fer­ent parties.

Global and hyper­ef­fi­cient helpdesk now com­bined with Gmail ? The struc­tural advan­tages of large com­pa­nies over SMB are shrink­ing by the day…