Doesn’t it always feel like Gmail is having trouble when you absolutely need it most? Google claims that in 2013, Gmail was up and running 99.978 percent of the time. This means that during an entire year, the average gmail account saw two combined hours of downtime. When Gmail goes down, it typically doesn’t go down for everyone, and last September’s downtime affected less than 50 percent of gmail users. The post about Google’s security and stability is part of an announcement that Google will now always use HTTPS encryption when emails are sent and checked.