Google has made its apology public soon after an outage shut down Gmail for two hours, no doubt causing difficulty for IT support and small businesses in IT across the world.

Ben Traynor, the vice-president of engineering and site reliability czar at Gmail, even resorted to making the issue into a pronoun, such was his disappointment at what happened, stating: "Today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such.

"We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation."

The outage only lasted for around 100 minutes, though the popularity of the service was at the forefront of his mind.

Mr Traynor said that the situation has Google's full attention to helping ensure this does not happen again.

Some actions are more straightforward and have been carried out, such as the increase in request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide extra headroom in case of emergency.

Free storage on Gmail continues to grow by the second, with today (September 2nd) reaching 7365.482221 megabytes in space for each individual user.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent).