If you have been following the recent news, Google had a major outage where emails were being deleted for certain users. Google did acknowledge that the problem was affecting around 0.02% of their users and have been continuing to work on fixing those issues.

Google has now posted an update on their official blog explaining what exactly went wrong. According to the updates, Google basically rolled out a new software update to their storage software which caused an unexpected bug. This bug affected around 0.2% of Gmail users.

The bug was quickly spotted by them which led them to perform a rollback to the earlier version of the software. Google is still continuing to fix the problem and even though they have multiple backups of user emails, most of it was corrupted by this bug. Google is now reportedly restoring these emails from tape backups, which have remained offline and not been affected by this bug.

However, users who were hit by this bug will not receive emails sent to them between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28. So if something important was sent during this period then the email sender will have to send it again to you.

Rest assured, outages such as these are not acceptable and it was really bad on Google’s part to roll out software which could cause such a problem. Though I love using Gmail, I would certainly not be happy if my emails are not delivered or if someone cannot send me an email.

Hopefully we will not see such problems in future again. If you have been affected by this problem, you can check the Apps status page for updates on the issue.