On Thursday Google App Engine, the mega-corp’s cloud platform offering, crashed, knocking some websites and services offline.  According to the Google status dashboard, the disturbance happened bewteen 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. PST on Thursday, bringing down customer apps and web sites that depend on the Google App Engine.

Apps written for the platform use the Java (and by extension, languages that run on the JVM), Go orPython programming languages.  Python apps, evidently, were unaffected.

Google’s status dashboard also indicated that a scheduled maintenance was being performed at the time, however, it is not 100% clear that the maintenance and performance malfunction are related.

A quote from a developer at “You vs. the Internet” summed it up thusly:

“Well, I think I aged a few years tonight. That really, really sucked. The worst part? Google never acknowledged that they had a problem,” a Wordament developer wrote. “Down the line of their Service Status was ‘Normal.’ And yet, we were running 0 servers. The other part that really sucked was our powerlessness to do anything. We couldn’t even contact support. Sigh.”

Google Chromebook is ready to launch on June 15. The low-cost notebook will run Google’s Chrome OS and be tightly integrated with Google Apps. But what is really cool is this: Google is also preparing to launch Chromebook for Business — which essentially is a hardware as a service (HaaS) plan for enterprise customers.

Details: The Chromebooks for Business plan will cost $28 per user per month for business, and $20 per user per month for students and school faculty. This is a direct attack on Microsoft’s own cloud offering, BPOS. The plan includes a combination of hardware, Google Apps and Google service and support.There is also chatter that Google will launch a major consulting arm to provide direct support to businesses in integrating this service.

Read more here.