Some Gmail users still without email

Some Gmail users are still without their emails five days after Google acknowledged a problem which wiped the messages of potentially tens of thousands of users.

Ben Treynor, a vice president of engineering at Google, said in an update to his original blog post that "Gmail should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue".

The wording suggests that some are still without their data days after Google admitted that it had lost the emails of some 0.02 per cent of its customers owing to a software bug in its datacentres.

Google was able to retrieve the data because it backs it up to tape as well as storing it in the datacentres, and said on Tuesday that the emails of all but 0.012 per cent of affected users had been restored.

V3.co.uk contacted Google for further information on those still affected, but was directed back to the blog post.

The temporary loss of the data undermines Google's insistence that cloud-hosted email services are the future of consumer and corporate communications.

Several V3.co.uk readers complained that they had been affected by the issue.

"I attempted to download my emails last night and it told me my username or password were not correct," said a user known as Andy.

"When I attempted to log on through a desktop computer this morning it said that my Gmail account had been disabled."