Gmail: Google Finds Missing Emails Eaten By Bug

We reported yesterday on a service interruption on Gmail. It turned out that due to a software bug, about 40,000 Gmail accounts were wiped clean, leaving inboxes empty. But thanks to Google will soon have all 40,000 Gmail accounts that were wiped out back in action. Google will soon restore the "misplaced" data (it was never really lost, thanks to Google's data storage redundancy).

Google said that just 0.02% of Gmail customers were affected, still a sizeable number with 170 million users. But the emails will take time to restore, because all of the electronic data was lost due to a bug. The emails must be restored from a tape backup. On Google's official blog, Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar said: "I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centres? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That's what happened here."

[via BBC]