It's possible -- I would personally "don't worry about it" for a week or two -- I had a domain last year set to auto-renew that didn't get renewed due to cc info changes and I didn't realize it until the domain was way into the redemption period, meaning the site "completely disappeared" and did not show for anything it did normally.

Long-story-short, it took less than 2 weeks after renewing it for the rankings to be restored. So, based on my experience, don't worry about it for a week or two -- If you don't "pop back in" where you were in that time-frame, then I'd start to worry a bit more.

All rankings restored and are back to the pre-outage positions today. For me this illustrates the importance of reliable hosting.

It looks like Google takes immediate action when a high-traffic website goes offline, probably to maintain the quality of the serps.

From my perspective, you are 100% correct Chris. It seems from previous experience that any outages over some specific amount of time (lick finger & stick in air), say around 6+ hours, hurts like hell your rankings. Just takes a few days to a few weeks (pending the length of the outage) to get back to normal.

Getting out of problematic hosting providers may save your sanity and worry.

Have other major outages happened in the past 3~6 months? If so, I would consider getting out and switch. Which is what I did to get out from my last host.
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:33 am (utc) on Nov 27, 2013]
[edit reason] edit at poster request [/edit]