They're calling it the Google Apps Status Dashboard. It's a simple page that displays the company's online applications, such as Gmail, Calendar and Docs, along with graphics that indicate whether the apps are working or not.
Writing on the official Google blog, company representative Tessa Prescott expressed regret for the snafu while promising more open communication with all users.
"The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it's also relevant to users of our consumer products," she wrote. "The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world."
Tech analyst Jason Kincaid gave the new dashboard a provisional thumbs-up.
"Google has been pretty good about responding to down time with blog posts alerting users with status updates, but having a dedicated page seems like a much better solution especially for users who don’t follow Google’s blogs," he wrote for TechCrunch.com.
The outage on Google's popular webmail service happened early Tuesday morning. Google posted an alert on its help pages saying that they were working on the problem. According to Google representatives, the outage only affected a "small subset" of its users, although tech analyst Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.com said she "wasn't buying" that story.
Hackers took advantage of the outage by building a Google group called "Gmail down" that purported to have information about the problem but instead just displayed adult images and links.
Although the group is user-generated, it did manage to find its way to the top of Google's search results for "Gmail down" very quickly. Google representatives responded to the snafu on their official blog.
For more information, visit the Google Apps Status Dashboard.
