Google has said that a storage software update caused some Gmail users to lose access to their e-mail data and said full functionality would be restored soon.
The glitch first surfaced on Sunday afternoon as thousands of users started complaining on message boards about missing data. It is believed to have affected about 150,000 Gmail users who lost their e-mail, attachments, applications, contact and chat logs.
Initial estimates were that 0.23% of all users were affected, but Google has revised the figure down to first 0.08% and then less than 0.02%, or about 40,000 accounts.
It added that access has been restored for one third of the affected users. The remaining 0.013% of accounts are also being restored and the issue is expected to be resolved for everyone within 12 hours.
Google VP of engineering and site reliability Ben Treynor wrote in a company blog that Google stopped the deployment of the software update as soon as the company realised that it was responsible for the glitch and reverted to the old software version.
Treynor apologised for the inconvenience and said, "The good news is that email 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."
Treynor also added that despite the fact that Google keeps multiple copies of the data in multiple data centers, software bugs can still affect several copies of the data. Treynor also said that e-mails sent to affected users likely went undelivered for some time.
