Gmail bug wipes out 150,000 user accounts

Google confirmed on Sunday that a major bug has mysteriously deleted the entire contents from within roughly 150,000 Gmail accounts. Google initially reported the problem to be more widespread, but it revised its initial estimate down from 0.29% of total Gmail user accounts to 0.08%. According to user reports, email correspondence from within affected accounts was deleted earlier this past weekend. Affected users were initially unable to log in to their accounts, and then found that their data had been deleted once access to the accounts had been restored. Accounts were essentially reset, with years worth of emails and chats having seemingly been erased. Google appears confident that the lost data will be restored, however, and it notes that users will be unable to access their accounts while engineers address the issue. “Google engineers are working to restore full access,” Google noted on its Gmail status page. “Affected users will be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts.”

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Tags: bug, cloud, deleted, deleted account, Email, email account, glitch, gmail, Gmail bug, google, google apps, wipe, wiped

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Shouldn’t we just trust Google in backing up their data? I receive like 100 new e-mails every day, so backing up each time takes to much time I guess..

http://google.com/profiles/107420723354282321618 wushu2004

sign up for Backupify. Free and automatic

sirpaul

Or just download all email to your PC. Mine syncs every 1 minute – that way I get notifications as soon as emails come in, the download doesn’t slow down my internet if there are emails with big attachments (because they dl as they come in, not all at once a few times a day), plus I get offline email access and search – priceless!

And I’m sure they backup data like this. It’s just a matter of fixing the bug and making the data usable again.

http://twitter.com/Steelers7510 Ty Carlson

#googlefail I’m pretty sure they should be able to restore the data though. I think the data is probably just lost somewhere in the MASSIVE amount of data google has on it’s servers.
Bringit

Droid!

sirpaul

hahahahaha, your comment + “Norm likes this” just made my day :)

http://twitter.com/danmiami Danny Garcia

Maybe this explains why my contacts started disappearing last night on my iPhone! At about 8pm last night, I was leaving for a party, had just messaged a bunch of people and my contacts went totally blank. I sync over the air with my gmail account. The contacts appeared to start coming back momentarily, but would only go to 50 contacts (stopped around letter C), then suddenly my address book disappeared again. It was about an hour later that I looked again and they were all back. Strange coincidence or should I play the lottery since it appears I may have been in that small percentage of “winners”??
Boa

classic rookie move.
serpentor

This is why I also forward my gmail to live mail as a backup.

http://twitter.com/Steelers7510 Ty Carlson

Pretty clever actually!

WTF

Looks like gmail is as reliable as an android…
Blackberries are way better

Does suck for those people.

numetheus

Google will restore the data supposedly. Don’t act like BlackBerry devices have no outages. There are outages all the time. Its the reason I gave up BlackBerry as a personal phone. Gmail outages are rare and have a higher up time than the BlackBerry service. I still rock a BB for work purposes. Things haven’t gotten better. Sure most of their outages are caused by maintenance, but this is no excuse now a days. A more well maintained system would have kept redundancy. Switch to a failover, perform maintenance, switch back, then maintenance on the failover. Users should not have to see downtime due to maintenance. This is a RIM fail and they haven’t learned in years. There was a major outage in January. Look up BlackBerry outage and there are TONS of information about them.

Todd

This is not what happened. A very temporary service disruption is very different than removing data. Big difference.
numetheus

You don’t know of there will be lost data. More than likely everyone will get their data back as soon as everything is restored. RIM had an outage once that lasted close to 24 hours (this is the event that got me to question their dependability). All you get from them is “we have an outage.” We don’t know if behind the scenes, there was data loss and they took the several hours to restore the data. At one time there were 3 major outages on one month. If Google does in fact, get the data back … I would still find their couple day outage as being more dependable as the frequent BlackBerry ones. There has only been one time where I have witnessed Google service being down, and that was only for an hour. If you haven’t kept track of it, google blackberry outage and make a spreadsheet of their downtimes. BB is not very dependable if availability 24/7 is what you want.

LOLcat

Maybe we should be talking about the android glitch that permanently deletes text message archives. That happened to me this weekend, I had never heard of it before and apparently it is a problem across many android phones.

Android FTL.
Geri O

Isn’t there a Google app for viewing gmail offline, essentially storing it on the user’s hard drive?

Ken

Yeah, it’s called “every mail client ever that can use POP or IMAP”

dwinsmith

This is quite disconcerting
Anonymous

Homeland Security at work

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