Google Accidentally Wipes 150000 Gmail Inboxes

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Well, that’s kind of inconvenient.

Over the weekend a hundred and fifty thousand Gmail users discovered that their email accounts had been wiped clean. As well as the contents of their inboxes, users complained that their contacts, labels and folders had all been erased.

Google said in a statement that it’s working hard to restore normal operation, but it remains unclear whether or not Google will be able to get back all of the deleted data.

"A very small number users are having difficulty accessing their Gmail accounts, and in some cases once they're in, trouble viewing e-mails,” Google said in a statement.

"This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we've already fixed the problem for some users. Our engineers are working as quickly as possible and we hope to have everything back to normal as soon as possible. We're very sorry for the inconvenience."

Google has yet to address the glitch in a posting on the official Gmail blog, instead preferring to communicate with affected users via a Google Support forum thread and Google App Status dashboard.

Mike CH, a Google employee and Gmail Engineer posted the following message to the support boards:

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Jane McEntegart

Jane McEntegart works in marketing communications at Intel and was previously Manager of Content Marketing at ASUS North America. Before that, she worked for more than seven years at Tom's Guide and Tom's Hardware, holding such roles as Contributing Editor and Senior News Editor and writing about everything from smartphones to tablets and games consoles.

30 Comments Comment from the forums
  • XReflection
    Wow. Way to be like 2 days behind the news...
    Reply
  • sparky2010
    wooops... sometimes i'd really like to know how things lead up to these "accidents"...
    Reply
  • Marco925
    Yet, people will scream that Gmail is the son of god, despite the fact that lately, they have all the problems.
    Reply
  • amk09
    Marco there is no denying that Google and everything affiliated with it is awesome. Every company has their issues, and no matter how much you hate, Google will just get better. Let me guess, you use a Mac and have an Iphone? Amirite?
    Reply
  • i love google. i haven't clean up my email for like years; and out of no where, google takes out the trash for me. thank you so much google.
    Reply
  • jjamess
    0.08% of users affected by this? How is this even news worthy?
    Reply
  • maddad

    I don't own anything "Apple" but I am amazed at all the haters. "Every company has their issues, and no matter how much you hate," Perhaps you should practice what you preach amk09. As for a the Gmail problem, I download any email that is important to my computer so I always have a backup. No technology is perfect they all have problems from time to time.
    Reply
  • randomizer
    jjamess0.08% of users affected by this? How is this even news worthy?Do you have any idea how many users that actually is? It's not like only 20 people have had email trouble.
    Reply
  • gannic
    I' one of them :'(
    Reply
  • i use to have two account, Gmail and Hotmail. but after someone hacked my hotmail (my fault i used the same password for other sites) what happend was: i changed my password, someone tried to rehack my account and didn't succeed, microsoft locked my account and wouldn't let me use it even though i had the right password!
    when i contacted them i wasn't able to give them enough details to unlock it because i haven't used messanger or sent emails from that mail for a very long time.
    so, if i had to choose between microsoft purposely locking me out of my own account and never taking responsibility for it
    or google erasing my inbox and contacts and trying to fix it
    I would choose the latter
    Reply