Mountain View, California — The unthinkable has happened… In what could be a major setback for those advocating cloud storage, Google’s Gmail users today experienced something bizarre– Several Gmail help forums were cramped with users who complained today of suddenly and mysteriously having lost their old e-mail, folders, and contacts data that was stored on their account, along with chat logs and the like.
Around 150,000 Gmail account holders this morning awakened to a shocking nightmare to discover that all their e-mail contacts, attachments and Google Chat logs have vanished. Users reported that they were able to receive new messages, but that none of their previous email exchanges were appearing. Contacts appear to have been preserved and the issue only seems to be affecting a subset of Gmail users (“less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase,” according to Google).
“I have lost ALL on my emails/folders etc. from gmail. Why would this happen? How can I restore everything?” wrote user bkishan.
“I was on my eMail normal and when I refreshed all my account settings, eMail, labels, contacts etc has just disappeared. I was running at 80% capacity is that anything to do with it? Is there a way that one can restore all of that?” asked another.
LibertyGirlLondon wrote in a blog post, “It is clear from the Gmail forums and Twitter that hundreds if not thousands of people have had their Gmail accounts compromised. A firm believer in the concept of cloud computing, it never occurred to me that my Gmail account could one day disappear.”
“This morning when I woke up I only saw two mails in my gmal box that were sent last night. All mail was gone,” user Wienke wrote to the forum. “I also got some notifications which you will get when you have a new account. Seems something must have been reset.”
But there is good news here: At 12:09 p.m. PT, Google said on its Apps status dashboard that it was aware of the issue and was investigating. At 5:02 p.m., the company said it was “continuing to investigate this issue. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users may be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts.”
Google mentioned that “less than 0.08%” of all Gmail users were affected by the bug, which completely reset accounts, even down to the detail offering a welcome message to those users when they first logged on today. They, and especially visitors to the Gmail Help Forum, were not amused.
Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In any event, we hope for a quick fix to this problem, and that anyone who lost what could be years upon years of communication get them back. Speaking of which, were you affected?
Meanwhile, keep a back up all of your Gmail forthwith. But wait a minute — how do you back up Gmail? Here:
This is a free software for Mac, PC and Linux called Gmail Backup. It is fairly easy to use. After a swift download, you just give it your credentials and it begins downloading all your e-mails, backing them up securely no matter what Google decides to do. After 30 minutes, it had downloaded 2.4% of my e-mails, so this is not going to take forever. It is probably time well spent.