Google has had a tough few months when it comes to outages and today’s Postini outage is just adding to their woes.

Many users of Postini (a wholly owned subsidiary of Google) have been experiencing severe delays of mail, with most reporting delays of around 4 hours.

Postini is not taking calls, as their call centre operates during normal USA office hours only, and to access their support site, you need to request permission which takes up to two business days to process.

The only other option is a call to Google, which has a recording saying they are aware of the problem, and do not know when it will be resolved.

I can see that this is going to become an argument as the “do no evil” company is refusing to admit this is an outage. Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow has been quoted as saying

We’re aware of an issue that’s causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the U.S., and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. Outbound mail is fully functional, but inbound mail has been flowing at a reduced rate for affected users. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience.

Given the size and veracity of complaints in forums all over the world, it seems like Google is trying very hard to play down a major fault. It is not specific to the USA, nor is it just a reduced rate. Mail is taking upwards of 12 hours to arrive (for us at least) and it seems that it is also affecting outbound – contrary to the statement above.