Gmail is down

For the first time since starting using Gmail today I have experienced serious downtime. Sure there have been minor downtime before usually for maintanence, however this is the first time it has been a problem for several hours. The service has been shakky all day and is still down.

This is when you discover the disadvantage of having all your mail online. Gmail almost acts as an arcive for me since you dont have to delete anything. This is very nice but not very convient when the service is offline :-(

Maybe Google could make a "make avialable offline" service. I dont know how it would work but it would be nice if it did somehow.