Schadenfreude - cloud computing

Just as Google Inc. was touting the idea (and offering to sell it to you) of Cloud Computing, one of it's Cloud Computing projects crashed and burned horribly. From ZD Net:

Google's Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy
The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly.

Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service. Something went terribly wrong, and its Blogger customers have been locked out of their accounts for more than a day. Google's engineers have been frantically working to restore service ever since, although they haven't shared any details about the problem.

A Blogger Service Disruption update contains four updates from the last 24 hours, starting with this one:

We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments.

That's nearly 48 hours of downtime, and counting. Overnight updates promise "We're making progress" and "We expect everything to be back to normal soon."

My question is, "What if this had happened to another Google service?" Say, Google Docs? What if every document you wrote and saved on Wednesday was suddenly taken offline on Thursday, and you no longer had your presentation or your notes or your research for a client meeting today? How does this promise from Google sound now?

Your apps, documents, and settings are stored safely in the cloud. So even if you lose your computer, you can just log in to another Chromebook and get right back to work.

Google has owned and operated Blogger since 2003. It's not like they're still trying to figure out how to integrate the service into their operation. If it can happen at Blogger, why can't it happen with another Google service?

What makes this outage particularly egregious is that it is being rolled out on a single platform. It isn't as though this was an update for an application that was expected to be running on everything from a 486 on Win95 to an eight core proc running Windows 7. They should have had the horsepower to be able to test it in their lab before deploying it...