Google on Monday blamed a software bug for a glitch that left some Gmail users without access to their e-mail.
"We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02 percent of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their e-mail," Ben Treynor, vice president of engineering, said in ablog post. "When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version."
Late Sunday, some Gmail users logged into their accounts to find theire-mails, folders, and other documents gone. Treynor said Monday, however, that the "e-mail 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," he wrote.
Google keeps multiple copies of your data in multiple data centers, but even so, this bug affected several copies of the data. Some copies were deleted, and Google has been working to recover that information.
"To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they're protected from such software bugs," Treynor wrote. "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 noted that e-mail that was sent to affected accounts between 6pm Pacific on February 27 and 2pm Pacific on February 28 was probably not delivered and bounced back to the recipient.
Google originally said that 0.08 percent of its users were affected by the bug, but later amended that to 0.02 percent. "As engineers dug further, got better info. We err on high side," Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said in atweet.
In January, Hotmail users experienced a similar phenomenon, when about17,000 users logged on to find all their e-mails and folders deleted. Microsoft's Mike Schackwitzsaid at the time there was an error in a script that was supposed to delete dummy accounts that Microsoft uses for testing purposes. Unfortunately, that error also removed real user accounts; they were later restored.
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