Google update triggered Gmail loss

Source from:http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2029569/google-update-triggered-gmail-loss

SEARCH ENGINE OUTFIT Google has confirmed that a storage software update was responsible for causing some Gmail users to lose access to their e-mail.

Some Gmail users complained of losing e-mails, contacts, and folders. Google claimed that 0.29 per cent of the user base was affected by the problem but has since revised that figure to less than 0.02 per cent, or about 40,000 of the service's 200 million accounts.

Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering and site reliability czar, said sorry for the mess and said he expects to have the lost data restored soon. He said that the data was not completely lost and Google had restored most of it already.

Writing in Google's Gmail blog, Treynor said that it was caused by a storage software update that introduced an unexpected bug.

"When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version," he said.

Users might be wondering how safe all this cloud computing lark really is if, as Google promises, all the data was backed up in different locations with the keys owned by people who have never met each other.

Treynor said this is because in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data.

"Some copies of mail were deleted, and we've been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue," he said.