It wasn't business-critical before, since they were using the free version. Businesses don't use free services with no SLA for business-critical things. Unless they don't know how to do business.
Don't make assumptions on what's business critical and what's not. Not every business has the same level of free capital, circumstances or domain knowledge to handle everything theoretically correctly. There is implicit trust in working with companies like Google; you expect everything to work properly. They don't have to, of course, but when they don't, articles like this chip away at the confidence we all have in Google.
