Menu
Google still working to restore Gmail service

Google still working to restore Gmail service

Company says e-mails are not lost, but many still without e-mail today

Two days after tens of thousands of Google Gmail users discovered their e-mail, chat histories and contacts had disappeared from their accounts, the problem still is not fixed.

Google announced Monday night that the Gmail issue, which struck some users on Sunday, was caused by a bug in a storage software update. While Google had said Monday afternoon that the issue would be resolved for all users within 12 hours, the company now says that the problem has not been fixed but hopes it will be "soon."

The good news is that Google reported that users' e-mails, contacts, folders and settings have not been lost. They are retrievable and should be back in users' accounts once the problem is resolved.

"Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty," wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president engineering and Site Reliability Czar, in a blog post . "That's what happened to 0.02 per cent of Gmail users yesterday, and we're very sorry. 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."

The number of users affected has varied. At first, the company estimated that 0.08 per cent, or 150,000 users had been affected. Later Monday, Google reduced that estimate to 0.02 per cent, or 35,000.

On Monday afternoon, a Google spokesman told Computerworld that engineers had restored service to about a third of those affected.

In his blog Monday night, Treynor addressed the question of how this could happen if Google has multiple copies of users' data in multiple data centers.

"Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data," Treynor wrote. "That's what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we've been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue."

He added that engineers have also archived to tape in order to save the data.

"To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape," he said. "Since the tapes are offline, they're protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center , which is why it's taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds."

Treynor said a detailed incident report will be posted to Google's Apps Status Dashboard .

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0 , emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com .

Read more about web 2.0 and web apps in Computerworld's Web 2.0 and Web Apps Topic Center.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags cloud computinginternetGoogledisaster recoverystoragesoftwareapplicationsBusiness ContinuityWeb 2.0 and Web Apps

More about Google

Show Comments
[]