I rely on Google’s Gmail service heavily as I do on Twitter to provide quick snippets of fresh news and infomation. Like 20 million or so other Gmail users yesterday, I was a bit frustrated at the system-wide outage. Twitter has numerous outages, although not as frequently as they had been occurring, but its stock excuse is to levy the blame on the user for overloading the service. However, while Google’s Gmail blog was silent concerning the outage, Todd Jackson, Gmail’s product manager, did post a first-rate apology as the problem was rectified.

Give Google an A for PR in this instance. The apology was textbook perfect. Google acknowledged its error and accepted its responsibility unconditionally. Jackson’s succinct post is worth quoting in total:

“Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

“We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

“We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

“Again, we’re sorry.”

The apology game in the business world is often clumsily played. As a PR counselor, I find most corporate apologies lacking. In fact, they often unintentionally — or deliberately, as in the case of Twitter — turn it back onto the customer. But, here, Google shows how to execute a sincere apology with all of the right things to acknowledge. In fact, considering that Gmail is technically still a beta product, Google’s apology stands out even more as an exemplary statement. When beta products go awry, it becomes the basis for the easiest excuse to make during an outage. Wisely, Google understood that the customer doesn’t care why the product or service is malfunctioning. The customer wants assurance that such problems won’t recur and that the company takes full responsibility for whatever triggered the outage.