A Galway man today filed a €47,000,000 lawsuit against Google for an outage to its Gmail service which lasted more than four hours.

Millions of users throughout the world found themselves unable to access the Gmail web page, although POP/SMTP and IMAP service functioned without a problem for the duration of what Google engineers describe as a ‘relatively minor database issue’.

Gmail outage sparked office productivity

This hasn’t stopped Loughlin O’Toole from Galway bringing the suit against Google for emotional distress, mental injury, extreme fear and violations of his civil rights.

“Four hours without Gmail, boy, that’s a lot to ask. What am I supposed to do in work if I can’t check my Gmail every two minutes?

There’s only so much time you can spend on Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Boards.ie, blogs, your work email, Hotmail, MSN Messenger and Digg. Jaysus, things got so bad I even fired up ICQ. It’s a shocking way to treat people and I demand compensation”.

Critics of the lawsuit have pointed out that Gmail is an entirely free service and as such people don’t really have any right to complain.

However, O’Toole’s lawyer, Dan O’Mahony, told us “Wherever there is the slightest injustice we shall be there. When the smallest offence is made, no matter how trivial or frivolous it seems to anyone with half a brain, we’ll be there to bleat and make sure that everyone knows we will not stand for it. They might call us pathetic, half-witted grudge-bearers with a transparent agenda but we don’t care”.

Experts say the chance of success for the lawsuit are slim but Google will be hoping to avoid the same kind of fate as Microsoft who were ordered to pay a Cavan man over €2,750,000 who sued saying Vista was ‘completely shit’.

Meanwhile offices are returning to normal with a huge slump in productivity being reported since the service was restored.