On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:48:58 -0700, Larry wrote:

On or around August 1.

This is the second protracted lack of service. It was sporadic between
the two 'outages'. I suspect they've actually exceeded their capacity with
the new Google Plus testing, as they've suspended invitations with the
admission that they've exceeded their capacity. Saw an article recently
that said it was the largest start up ever (22m+ users?). Just a guess
that's all running in parallel to existing offerings on existing servers,
so they've prioritized what's available. Groups are high volume, low
return. There was some short unavailability of all things Google on Monday
AM, so I think they were playing with their DNS for a bit.