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To the list of essential utilities we can't live without -- electricity, gas, water -- you'd better add one more: Gmail.
The free Google email service now has 350 million users in 54 languages. So when it experienced an outage that affected a small subset of users for around half an hour Tuesday, the resulting cacophony on Twitter read like the end of the world.
According to Google, the problem affected roughly 2% of all Gmail users. (Anecdotally, that sounds about right -- only one user in the Mashable office was affected.)
But 2% of 350 million is still a whole lot of upset, especially when it comes to a service that seems to govern all its users' Instant Messages as well as vital email. Many services we can live without for 30 minutes of our work day; Gmail, apparently, is not one of them. (Heck, even if the electricity goes down in your building, you can still work from your 3G smartphone.)
It may not be the case that all 7 million afflicted took to Twitter to voice their concerns, their stress, their withdrawal or their amusement, but it certainly felt like it. "#Gmail" became a trending hashtag, and "#Gfail" was surely not far behind.