People are freaking out about Google, more specifically, Gmail. Follow #GoogleFail on Twitter and you can see what seems to be a global concern. A few months ago, Google had another hiccup when every Web page the search engine delivered was considered malware. (Read Charlene Li’s post about the incident.)

Li had admitted that Google’s mistake had an impact on her relationship with the company:

Does this incident erode my trust in Google? Yes, it does. But not to the point where I would switch my allegiances. And to Google’s credit, they addressed the problem quickly and communicated openly about the problem on their blogs.

[UPDATE, 5/14, 6.49pET: The Google outage, of course, ended hours ago. A post went up on Wired.com not long ago, and Wired editor Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) twittered it out not long after. 

kitsonRT @chr1sa [@wired] Amazing graph showing #googlefail’s impact. Google practically IS the Internet:http://sn.im/goog0514#scrm 

The post includes a graphic that says more about Google’s impact than any of us could on our own:

Wow. —Josh Weinberger, managing editor.]

[More (from Jessica) after the break...]

As of this post (12:15 PM ET), Google hasn’t addressed this Gmail/GoogleFail situation on their corporate blog. [UPDATE, 5/14, 7.02pET: Here's Google's official explanation, posted as a blogpost at 3.15pET.] While a couple hours of downtime on a Saturday morning (in North America) wasn’t enough to disuade people from leaving Google, responses to today’s mishap suggests that maybe some people aren’t going to be sticking around. Google’s built a strong brand, a trusted brand, but this apparent outrage proves that the battle for customer loyalty is an on-going mission.

#GoogleFail Tweet

#GoogleFail Tweet Stream - May 14, 2009