Reportedly fixed on Friday:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9112738&intsrc=news_ts_head

Is there real life experience how this outage was started?

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-feel-your-pain-and-were-sorry.html

Thanks.
But was there really two different issues, because the blog entry you pointed states that problems were resolved on Mon 11th Aug already (see ComputerWorld text)?

sharing the same link here too (posted to "Can't log in Gmail" thread)
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Gmail-Outage-google-email,news-2372.html