Last night, Gmail went down and it had alot of users talking about it on Twitter and FriendFeed.

It was the number #1 topic on Twitter Search and was covered alot in my feeds on twitter and friendfeed, even TechCrunch blogged about the Systemwide Gmail Outage and this got me thinking - could this be done for pr purposes or was it really “raining” in the clouds.

Imagine if you took down a much valued service temporarily, you’re going to see alot of bloggers discussing it as well as, on the likes of Twitter, FriendFeed and much more. This means your getting press coverage for free and boosting your brand and as a result, you’re saving money on your advertising spend - and for any company that’s a good thing - no matter how big you are.

This also seems to ring true, when the GMail blog didn’t comment on the issue for a long period of time and the HTML Gmail Version was working through-out the mass outage - which could mean GMail could have been taken down for pr purposes.

A company as large as Google wouldn’t suspend a service to get FREE pr now, would it?

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