Gmail outage was not only an inconvenience it calls into question -- yet again -- the feasibility of present-day cloud computing. One popular prediction is that future computers won't need huge hard drives because all our applications and personal data (photos, videos, documents and e-mail) will exist on remote servers on the Internet (otherwise known as "cloud computing").

But how viable is this Utopian computing future when the accessibility of your files is dependent on forces beyond your control?
When Gmail went down Tuesday, many users were left without access to their e-mail for nearly two hours. After Google had sorted out the mess, the company said in a blog post the cause of the outage was overloaded servers. Sound familiar? Google gave a similar explanation after a widespread service outage left 14 percent of Google users across the globe without access to many of the search company's services.

A worldwide outage of Google's Gmail online e-mail system was caused by a traffic jam on its servers, according to Google's official Gmail blog. The problem was that some recent changes designed to improve traffic flow on request routers, servers designed to direct Web queries to the appropriate Gmail server, overloaded the system after workers took some Gmail servers offline to perform routine upgrades.

The overload resulted in people around the world being unable to access Gmail for about 100 minutes. Gmail engineers were alerted to the problem within seconds of the failures and after figuring out what the problem was, brought additional request routers online. Google made a big splash after the company announced it was working on a new operating system it calls Chrome OS. Google has made it clear the system will rely heavily on accessing the Web and Web-based applications instead of desktop programs. Now, Gmail is more than 99.9 percent available to users.