Google software ‘update’ caused Gmail failure

KitGuru reported on some rather worrying Gmail issues this week and Google have finally revealed what caused the panic on Monday.

Google originally said that only 0.29 percent of their user base was affected by the mysterious ‘disappearing' email issue, but Google have since revised their figures to only 0.02 percent, which relates to around 40,000 people within the 200,000,000 accounts.

Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering apologised to the people affected by the issue and said the company will get the lost data restored very shortly.

“The good news is that email was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected,” Treynor wrote in a company blog. “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 also explained that multiple copies of data are held within multiple data centers and that sometimes ‘software bugs can affect several copies of the data'. Google however play it safe and keep additional offline backups on tape which means that restoring data is always an option, if it means additional lead time.

Treynor said the issue was due to a software ‘update' which was halted during the update phase when Google realised that bugs were present. The software was then reverted to the older version as soon as they found out.

Treynor also said that email sent to those users with issues was more likely undelivered but the message sender would get an alert meaning they could resend at a later date.

KitGuru says: Are you still confident in cloud services or are you already taking measures to keep more offline backups of important data?

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