It turns out that I was hit by this issue. And guess what - it was a big deal. For starters, it is a MONDAY here in Australia. There was no support information on this, and no help from Google.

Secondly, the login message was "Your account has been disabled". If I could log in, and there was a message that my email was being restored from backup because they had a failure - fine. That wasn't the case. They had disabled my Google Apps Administrator account (same account as my email), email was bouncing, and I couldn't log in to my email OR the administration interface. The "reset your password" and "unlock your account" links failed to unlock it.

Comparing an email outage to people's deaths is poor form. Of course they aren't the same. That doesn't make it an issue when email is a super important communication tool.