Technology News of the week - Gmail

Technology News of the week - Gmail

Earlier this week thousands of email account with Gmail were wiped out. Thousands of people were left with totally empty inboxes, this was done by accident. This really was bad for these people, especially if they were one that also lost their contacts that they had stored with Gmail.

Now some of the accounts were reported to be restored by Gmail, so not everyone’s accounts were totally destroyed. The company reported that engineers with Google were working feverishly to restore service to the people. In a statement, Google said: "This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we've already fixed the problem for some individuals."

So if Gmail has roughly around 150 – 200 million users then somewhere around 150,000 users were affected by this situation by this terrible mistake.

Google attributes the problem of this happening due to a software update. Google exec’s released this report stating:

Google VP of engineering and site reliability Ben Treynor wrote in a company blog that Google stopped the deployment of the software update as soon as the company realized that it was responsible for the glitch and reverted to the old software version.

Treynor apologized for the inconvenience and said, "The good news is that email was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected."

"Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon."

Treynor also added that despite the fact that Google keeps multiple copies of the data in multiple data centers, software bugs can still affect several copies of the data. Treynor also said that e-mails sent to affected users likely went undelivered for some time.