As we reported yesterday, many Gmail users woke up Sunday to find that their email inboxes were empty – and not in a good way. Users reported their entire Gmail history – inboxes, outboxes, and archives – were wiped clean.
Google reports now that it has identified the problem, which it says was a bug resulting from a software storage update. Users affected will have access to their Gmail accounts again, and their email messages will be restored “though it may take longer than we originally expected.”
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Google confirmed the problem with some Gmail accounts yesterday afternoon, and its engineers have been working on the problem since. Although Google initially said the problems affected .29% of Gmail users, the company has revised those estimates downward to .08% and then to .02% of users.
It was a small number of accounts, to be sure, but the problem has lasted about 30 hours. And for those impacted, the thought of losing all their email records was fairly frightening, as many who took to the Google forums to help troubleshoot their problems remarked with panic and frustration that they had years of email history stored there.
Fully restored emails or not, the incident is a good reminder to back up your data by either storing it locally or by storing a copy with another service.
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