Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users two days back. The good news is that email was never lost and Gmail team have restored for many of those affected.
About 40000 accounts were wiped clean, leaving inboxes empty. It turned out due to a software update that introduced the unexpected bug.
If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered.
But, thanks to Google’s data storage redundancy, they also backup it up to tapes. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs.
Data for the remaining 0.012% of affected users has been successfully restored from tapes and is now being processed. Accounts with more mail will take more time.
Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/autodafe/2116296365/
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