Google apologises for Gmail problems

Google has blamed a storage software update bug for a problem yesterday which left potentially tens of thousands of Gmail users with empty accounts, and has promised that the situation will be back to normal soon.

Ben Treynor, a vice president of engineering at Google, apologised for the Gmail problems in a blog post issued early this morning UK time.

"Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That's what happened to 0.02 per cent of Gmail users yesterday, and we're very sorry," he 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 explained that the bug affected multiple copies of user data kept in multiple datacentres, which means Google is being forced to restore the affected data from tape backups, which are always offline and so unaffected by the bug.

"But restoring data from tape backups takes longer than transferring your requests to another datacentre, which is why it's taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds," he said.

Updates on the incident will be outlined on the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Treynor also warned that any users affected by the issue are likely not to have received any messages delivered between around 2am and 10pm GMT on 28 February.