This topic just came up recently on a podcast I was on where someone said a large service was down for X amount of time and the service being down tanked his entire business while it was down for days. But he was compensated in hosting credits for the exact amount of down time for the 1 service that caused the issue. It took so long to resolve because it took support a while to figure out it was their service, not his site.

So then I jokingly responded with that being like going to a restaurant, getting massive food poisoning, almost dying, ending up with a $150,000 hospital bill and then the restaurant emails you with "Dear valued customer, we're sorry for the inconvenience and have decided to award you a $50 gift card for any of our restaurants, thanks!".

If your SLA agreement is only for precisely calculated credits, that's not really going to help in the grand scheme of things.

Not OP, but how do you measure them? Let's say, for example, you can send and receive email, but attaching files does not work. Is the service up or down?

What if the majority of your users can access the service, but one of your BGP peers is not routing properly and some of your users are unable to access?

In this example: you get free days. Which depending on your business might be worthless if you have suffered more monetary loss due to the downtime than the free days are worth.

Like they have any bargaining power against Google.

not an announcement, seems like just a statement. I assume an official statement will come with the post mortem blog post in the next few days.