As a CTO I would have dreamed only for such release policies.

"We've taken Orkut.com offline as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users," the Orkut team said in an e-mail message sent to members.

Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez confirmed the outage on Tuesday and said that the site should be operating again "shortly."

Orkut, which first went online last week, is the latest example of Google's dabbling in new technology. The service, which aims to connect people via their friends and colleagues, launched quietly, but it quickly generated interest from people around Silicon Valley, where Google is based. Orkut restricts membership, so that people must be invited to sign up, but it sent out thousands of invitations last week.

I was rather used to full night work chnging the database format while testing a new application in the productive environment. But yeah it wasn't Google....