That is possible, of course. However, I would point out that these meetings were attended by a whole team of contractors, each with their own computers configured with their own choice of OS and browser. Moreover, they were held in a variety of different locations, and indeed across several different locations at once via teleconference on some occasions. In other words, it wasn't one very serious problem, it was probably a whole bunch of little problems that caused specific features to be inaccessible to certain locations or not to work properly on specific client platforms during a particular period. (Before anyone jumps in, clearly everyone's Internet connections were fine during the teleconferences, because we were using Internet-based conference software to run them...)
My point is only that it's a bit rich to claim a 99.984% uptime based, presumably, on having servers available, if the code that is running on those servers isn't properly quality controlled so that customers can actually use it to do real work. Just because most of the people on the team can connect fine, it still screws up the meeting if a few others can't follow along. Just because people looking at the spreadsheet in Firefox and Chrome can update it, it doesn't help if the guys using IE can't see the changes.
To get to the 99.984% number, 160 people out of every million users would have no access to the application on any given moment. The number doesn't look that inflated. Most of the time, our (disclaimer: I don't work for Google, but I host a couple web apps) stuff just works.
That is possible, of course. However, I would point out that these meetings were attended by a whole team of contractors, each with their own computers configured with their own choice of OS and browser. Moreover, they were held in a variety of different locations, and indeed across several different locations at once via teleconference on some occasions. In other words, it wasn't one very serious problem, it was probably a whole bunch of little problems that caused specific features to be inaccessible to certain locations or not to work properly on specific client platforms during a particular period. (Before anyone jumps in, clearly everyone's Internet connections were fine during the teleconferences, because we were using Internet-based conference software to run them...)
My point is only that it's a bit rich to claim a 99.984% uptime based, presumably, on having servers available, if the code that is running on those servers isn't properly quality controlled so that customers can actually use it to do real work. Just because most of the people on the team can connect fine, it still screws up the meeting if a few others can't follow along. Just because people looking at the spreadsheet in Firefox and Chrome can update it, it doesn't help if the guys using IE can't see the changes.