UPDATE: Google Restores Missing GMail Accounts

Google has announced that the bug that affected its GMail service, causing many users to find their accounts empty, has now been resolved. The organisation apologised for the problem, which it said affected 0.02% of Gmail users on February 27 (6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28) and reassured affected users that their emails was never lost and access for many of those affected has now been restored. Thus, users can gradually expected their GMail services to be back to normal as soon as possible (accounts with more mail can expect to wait a little longer).

What Caused The GMail Glitch

According to Google, it released a software update which caused the unexpected software bug that led to the temporary loss of access to the email accounts of around 0.02% of GMail users. Following several complaints that brought this issue to the company’s knowledge, deployment of the new software was halted. However, all affected users’ data has now been successfully restored and processed from tapes. Therefore users should be able to regain access to their mailboxes as usual.

GMail Backup System

Although, Google has multiple copies of user information in multiple data centres, the explanation that was given is that in some rare cases, software bugs can still affect several copies of data at once – which is what happened in this instance thus leading to the loss of some copies of mail. In anticipation of these kind of events taking place, Google also backs up information to offline tapes (which usually take longer to restore) so as to protect user-data from software bugs in case of eventualities.

If you are still experiencing issues, please contact Google maintenance directly via the following temporary alias – gmail-maintenance@google.com