Thousands are estimated to have been affected, with the approximate number of users impacted at 0.02 percent. Although an official tally of total Gmail users is not publicly available, it is estimated to be around 150–200 million.
Reports of the Gmail disruption began to surface Sunday afternoon, with some users complaining of losing all the e-mails in their inboxes and e-mail sent folders. Others reported that their accounts appeared to be reset and appeared to be like a “brand-new Gmail account.” Some contacts also seemed to have been deleted.
Reportedly, a Google Gmail engineer named “Mike CH” posted comments on a support forum early Monday morning that claimed “we have temporarily locked the affected users out of their accounts whilst we perform repairs.”
He added that “accounts that are affected are fully disabled,” and the company was trying to disable only Gmail so other Google services would be available in the meantime, and so that e-mail would stop bouncing and get “queued up for later delivery instead.”
Some accounts have been recovered, which indicates that at least some of the missing data was able to be retrieved.
Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, said, “we hope to have everybody back by the end of the day. … It is our expectation that we will restore all accounts.”
The Google glitch has highlighted clients’ reliance on the e-mail system as well as the importance of backing up data. Google has provided details under Gmail Help for more information.
Other systems have also experienced outages recently. For instance, a Flickr staff member accidentally deleted a user’s five year-old account, according to CNN, and 4,000 photos were lost. Ultimately, the photos were able to be restored. Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail users also experienced temporary loss of access to e-mails and folders in January.
In December 2010, BlackBerry users also experienced two bouts of similar instances. Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, claimed that the disruption impacted users in America, China, South Korea, Australia, and other countries. The most recent technical glitch was likely in February when software upgrades were meant to occur.
