The term "beta" is so overused that it has nearly lost its meaning. Sometimes, however, it still means "warning, ye who enter here."

Late last week my client's datastore indexes were corrupted. The failure was demonstrably AppEngine's. Attempts to manually rebuild indexes failed. The AppEngine team has been working for several days to resolve the problem, which we appreciate.

But such failures are disheartening when you're busy signing up paid customers.