It didn't affect me. I would like to add that I hardly ever have service issues with GMail. Kudos to them for addressing the problem and being open about it, and for excellent FREE service.
Not a big deal to me since I don't need to check my Gmail account every hour like some people. Good to see they are working to make it more reliable though.
I've seen hotmail / msn messenger go down for longer than this without any explanation offered at all. one would expect that google would have issues from time to time as well. anyone arguing that microsoft is benefitting from this needs to really rethink what they are saying. i've already seen cnet try to say that microsoft was happy about this. i really doubt microsoft would have an opinion on the matter that would bolster their own product. just kind of shows how many hacks there are that claim to be in the IT field.
I tried accessing it when it was down and it frustrated me for a bit then I just went about my day and did something else. Hopefully it doesn't happen again but 2 hours without email didn't kill me yesterday.
So I'm a huge gmail fan. Best email out there in my opinion. Everyone at my company basically uses it (for it's chat aspect) and it archives everything automatically in a super efficient search. All that being said....it's reliability has been truly horrible lately. I only know this because I use it all day at work, and when it goes down suddenly im out of the communication loop. It happens pretty often too...like once a month. I'd never know if it happens with other emails because I don't sit on them 9 hours a day....but yeah, it's getting annoying.
Google makes gazillions of dollars off of their 'free' service with their ad space. If you think about it, it's not free, your simply giving them space in your brain. Meh, I wasn't using it. That being said, I love Google and their excellent services. Quality, innovative products at the cost of a fairly unobtrusive ads, they've got my vote. 2 hours is a hiccup, not an outage.
I was using the web interface and it affected me. I was quite surprised that it was down. Maybe they should have kept the beta tag a little longer after all.
Past couple of days I would have to refresh my gmail more then once because It would freeze or not show me all my email's, Google better do something before they start losing users interest in it.