Having an e-mail address is nowadays something normal, and this has become the easiest and fastest way to communicate and transfer data in seconds. However, when you wake up and see your e-mail is gone, you’re gonna be stunned, as it happened to thousands of people on Sunday, February 27th 2020, when a Google bug disabled 150 000 Gmail accounts.
It seems that this glitch didn’t amuse people as most keep their attachments safe in their e-mails and confronting yourself with the situation of having everything gone, is well, not hilarious. For most people this is a nightmare and so the Gmail help forum was bombarded with unsatisfied visitors who wanted some quick answers to their problem.
Probably these are the times in which you appreciate technology and find yourself wondering why you haven’t saved your most important files. Well, although these accounts were disabled, and everything deleted, Google has ensured their users that they are doing all they can to solve the problem that has been giving everyone a headache. The engineers are trying their best to resolve this problem and restore the accounts, but will it be possible to restore all the information which has been lost?
Well, it seems that the official report states that the information is safe and protected until it will be restored. The official statement said:
“To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.”
Also stated is the fact that any e-mails which have been sent to the affected e-mail accounts between 6 PM PST on February 27 and 2 PM PST on February 28, 2020 might not have been delivered and in consequence they have been returned to the sender as a failure notice.
It seems that technology is not always infallible so this could serve as a reminder to backup your Gmail. The Google team has issued an apology and thanks everyone for understanding.