Washington, March 01: Tens of thousands of Gmail users found themselves locked out of their accounts on Sunday, a glitch Google engineers were still struggling to fix and fully understand yesterday morning, FoxNews.com reported.
Initial reports suggested as many as half a million accounts were compromised, the years’ worth of emails potentially permanently erased. Google eventually determined that the problem affected just 0.08 per cent of users, or about 150,000 accounts.
“Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future,” the company wrote. “Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users will be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts.”
The company did not offer additional details. Meanwhile, Google engineers continue to study the service outage, according to a series of notes on the company’s status page.
Meanwhile, locked-out and livid users have taken to the company’s user forums in their quest for help.
“Google support help please!” wrote one Gmail user. “I cannot access my account, there is really valuable information there for me, this account have been my principal account for four years, I am really afraid to think about how much data I lost.”
Tech site Engadget suggested that the event should serve as a wake-up call for users: Even services that work in the “cloud” – services that are accessible only online, through a browser – can potentially fail. This latest incident underscores the need to back up files and data regularly.
——–Agencies