EarthLink (ELNK) email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.

“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”

Mr. Stone said that the outages, which occurred Thursday and again Tuesday, taught the startup that it needed to be ready for online assaults.

“We spent a lot of 2008 sort of catching up with a lot of the popularity of Twitter — unexpected popularity — getting there technically so that we’re stable. And along comes this massive attack,” he said. “We learned a lot from it.

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There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.

Some 52,000 households in Santa Clara County were expected to be without phone and Internet until at least late Thursday night, according to a county spokesman. Other counties experienced outages as well. Cellphones were also impacted since the cables that were cut handled all voice and data traffic in and out of the area.

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“MobileMe members may be unable to access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

If by “may” Apple means “definitely,” and by “ASAP” it means “nearly three hours and counting,” then I think we’re all on the same page.

It has been a hair under two weeks since Apple deemed MobileMe’s now-infamous mail woes a thing of the past on the MobileMe Status blog. Nevertheless, error messages like the one above and a healthy new Apple support discussion thread seem to disagree. The first post there at 12:09 pm MDT asks whether mail.mac.com is down, with several respondents and some Ars staff confirming that the troubled service is experiencing another outage lasting a couple hours so far.

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Today, Google’s Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can’t access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.

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On Friday, a massive outage occurred at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting companies, experienced an outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes us mad. It makes us say things like: Well, maybe we shouldn’t be using the cloud.

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Imagine, if you will, a world with no Internet. No email. No e-commerce. And no BlackBerrys. Email would be supplanted by snail mail; cellphones by landlines. Now imagine what the future would look like. Futurists say virtual business services of all sorts, accounting, payroll and even sales would come to a halt, as would many companies. This immediately made me think of E. M. Forster’s disturbing tale ” The Machine Stops.” Written in 1909, it describes the downfall of a civilization that had wrapped itself in the cocoon of an automated life-support system. But people began to think of the Machine as an infallible deity, and lived in their individual mechanical wombs, communicating and doing business only through the Machine.

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