Search Engine's Software Bug Caused Deleted Emails

Earlier this week, Google claimed the reason why some Gmail users were unable to access their email accounts was due to a "software bug."

Google unveiled a software update that spawned the bug, resulting in about 0.02 percent of Gmail users without email access.

"When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version." said the search giant's vice president of engineering.

Over the weekend as the small portion of affected Gmail users went to log into their accounts, they were unable to find their e-mails, folders, and other archived documents. Google's VP of engineering reassured users that the "e-mail was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected."

"When I logged into my Gmail account to find some of my critical emails gone, my heart sunk into my stomach," said Bob Wiley who operates is own organic SEO company. "I rely on my Gmail account to communicate with my clients, in addition to all of the emails I have archived."

Fortunately for users like Bob, Google maintains several copies of its user's data in multiple storage centers. But even with such reliable back-up, the unexpected bug affected multiple copies of the data which resulted in some copies becoming deleted. Google is applying efforts to recover that data.

"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," the engineering VP wrote. "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."

The search engine company originally stated that 0.08 percent of Gmail users were affected by the bug, however later claimed that only 0.02 percent were influenced. The users affected by the bug were all random with no particular accounts being a target.

Hotmail users experienced a similar incident back in January when about 17,000 users were stripped of their email lists and folders. At the time of phenomenon, Microsoft claimed there was a script error that was designed to delete dummy accounts the company uses specifically for testing purposes. Although the script's sweep unexpectedly removed real user accounts, Microsoft's technicians were able to fully restore them.