Google Cloud is the number 4 most monitored status page on StatusGator and Google Apps is number 12. In addition, at least 20 other services we monitor seemingly depend on Google Cloud because they all posted issues as soon as Google went down.
It's always interesting to see these outages at large cloud providers spider out across the rest of the internet, a lot of the world depends on Google to stay up.
Server hardware is actually quite expensive. End users "smart" phones are cheap hardware, running dumb software which renders them as terminals for the cloud. That's sad because smartphone hardware is quite capable of doing useful work.
(For instance, I have a 500GB MicroSD card in my phone which contains a copy of my OwnCloud)
It's always interesting to see these outages at large cloud providers spider out across the rest of the internet, a lot of the world depends on Google to stay up.