Tuesday's outage of Gmail service, for over an hour, brought to light two main facts - the increasing dependence of the Google technology, and the defenselessness of even a biggie like Google, in the face of pervasive glitches!

With the Gmail service knocked offline on Tuesday, a "majority" of the reportedly 37 million unique visitors to the e-mail service were affected - those who get Gmail for free, and businesses that use paid versions.

Commenting on the disquieting outrage, Google said that it was alerted to the failures within seconds, and the problem was fixed.

The disruption of service on Tuesday, which saw the Gmail users getting an "Unable to reach Gmail" error message, resulted from Google taking some of its Gmail servers offline for routine maintenance. Google probably misjudged the load that would be transferred on other computers that would direct user-traffic to the appropriate Gmail servers.

Google said that it has made the requisite changes, like additions to the capacity, to avert similar occurrences in the future. In fact, the Google website said that Gmail had a "service disruption" Monday too, for a "small subset' of users.

Rendering an apology, Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said in a blog post: "On behalf of Google I wanted to let everyone know that we're really sorry for the inconvenience and working to fix the problem as fast as we can."