brinked - 12:01 am on May 20, 2011 (gmt 0)

FWIW One of the top sites in a niche I am involved with which is extremely competitive is always very slow and is down about 10% of the time. There are people complaining about the site being down on their facebook fan page and there response is "If our site is down please try back at a later time or come back at non peak hours where there is not much traffic to the site"

For some reason the site ranks very well despite these server issues so I take it that google really does not put that much stock into load or up time.