The article also links to other outages. Partial outages are frequent enough that they don't make news anymore and Google has a dashboard interface that shows them here:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

The relevant context is that cloud services go down. There's nothing straws about that. Amazon experienced a large issue recently as well:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clou...