The guys over at Gmail will be having a hectic day today as users have been flocking to the support forums all day to report that their email accounts have effectively been reset with some losing year’s worth of emails. Thankfully Google engineers are on the case and should be able to restore affected accounts as they quite sensibly store data on several drives in several different locations – the problem they have is identifying the accounts.
Engadget says 500,000 users may have been affected; users have lost emails and all the photos, documents and any other files they may have been sent over the years. It’s another alarming call to back up your data and frequently.
Google says that just .29% of Gmail users have lost data, we say just loosely because this is actually a big number when you consider there were 170 million users this time last year. If you put a moderate 30 million extra users over the last year the total number of accounts that may have problems is around 650,000.
As mentioned earlier Google does expect that data will be recovered and many are already talking about the failure linking it to Google’s upcoming Chrome OS which is also cloud based. Some users are saying this shows the cloud shouldn’t be trusted where as other are saying wait and see, after all if all data is successfully restored then surely this shows the strengths of the cloud as a robust storage solution.
Have you been affected or know anyone who has? Has it knocked your confidence in Gmail?
I am one of the 500,000 people that woke up to find that over 65,000 emails in my gmail account are gone. But, I feel confident that they will be restored. I have had this account since it was in Beta and I have never had a problem before. I successfully use Chrome OS every day and I am currently enjoying the Google CR-48 laptop which I received to be part of the pilot program. Google does good work. Of course, if my 65,000+ emails are not restored then I will probably feel differently. 🙂
I am one of the users also effected — Over 8,000 business related emails with attachments etc gone. The crappiest part of this whole debacle is that I actually pay google for my email — not a freebie user as well as $$ on google adwords. I may not spend thousands but I did trust google with my hard earned money to not lose this information. I would love to know if anyone actually has any kind of direct email contact to google support? IT is like looking for a needle in a haystack…..
I have had Gmail since beta and I have never had a problem. I woke up Sunday to find that all my e-mail had been deleted. I changed my password and was back up and running with no e-mail history. Sunday night Google disabled my account. I thought my account had been hijacked. After reading this article it may be a system error. I have all my accounts/bills etc tied to this address. I had to setup a Yahoo account so that I could report the issue to Google. I may just setup a domain via a hosting company and get off of Gmail. I will give Google a couple days to make this right…
I've also been affected today. All of a sudden I've been told my account has been disabled. I've been with Gmail for over 8 years and it's the first time I've ever experienced a problem so I have faith in Google that they will sort it out. Fingers crossed!!