GMail goes down, how well did it recover?

A couple of days ago, Google's gmail service was down for some time. I was actually using it from my mobile phone, and my fiancée was using its embedded gtalk chatting to a friend when it started playing up. Now I'm not really amazed that Gmail had problems, after all it only happens very rarely and they did recover relatively quickly. The interesting bit to my story is the following:

A gtalk message that was sent to my fiancée while the service was playing up was delivered a day later! It wasn't delivered as soon as the service was back up again, but about a day later. This says a couple of things:

1. When things went wrong, Google made sure that the first priority was to get some level of service back up and running
2. Most importantly, after the storm passed, they made sure they cleaned up and that every transaction, including insignificant gtalk messages that might have been stuck somewhere in limbo, were recovered and completed.

And it's good that they did. Because it happened to be quite an important message, and although it was received a bit late, it saved quite a bit of trouble.

We tend to rely on web services way too much, even a simple instant message. The loss of an instant message might not be life threatening, but sometimes we rely on it as if it was a life saver.