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Gmail Bug Caused Loss of Data
| Technical by Staff ReporterTens of thousands of users were likely affected by the interruption of service
Google’s Gmail service was interrupted for a number of users recently as an “unusual bug” caused many copies of users’ emails to be deleted; Google says it is currently fixing the problem.Google estimates that the bug affected 0,02 percent of its Gmail users worldwide.
“Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty,” began a blog post by Ben Treynor, Vice President of Engineering and Site Reliability at Google.
“That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. 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 explains that even though Google keeps multiple copies of users’ data in multiple data centres, unusual software bugs can still affect several copies of the data.
“That’s what happened here,” he said. “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.”
Google, however, also stores the data on tapes that are offline, ensuring that when problems like this arise users’ data is always safe.
But this is the reason it’s taking so long to get everything back to normal, according to Treynor.
Restoring data from tapes takes longer than transferring a request to another data centre, “which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds,” he said.
The unusual bug was introduced when the firm released a new storage software update, but halted its deployment as soon as the problem had been spotted, according to Treynor.
He said Google would post a detailed incident report as well as the corrective measures to prevent a recurrence to the Apps Status Dashboard.
“If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered.”
“Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare,” he added.
Source: www.bizpremises.co.za
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