Google restored on Monday nearly one-third of the thousands of Gmail accounts that were compromised the day before.
Some users who were able to log in found years of emails deleted permanently. Google first reported this problem on Sunday afternoon and hopes to restore all the lost messages by Tuesday morning.
Gmail user Meghan McCracken talks about how problems with her email account have affected her. (Via Skype)
USC computer science professor Dennis McLeod said the glitches were not surprising because of the large scale the email service is operating.
“No matter how backed-up oriented reliable, something like this seems inevitable,” McLeod said.
Google did not offer additional information on what caused the problems, but it said it would have an update on Tuesday on the Google App, “Dashboard.”
Although this temporary glitch only affected two out of every 10,000 users, McLeod said it shows society’s dependency on Gmail and other free e-mail services. Users who were affected said it was a big inconvenience.
“My real problem was the access was disabled, so I literally couldn’t use any of these things,” said Gmail user Meghan McCracken. “For someone like me, I’m a freelance writer and artist, and basically all of my content that represents my livelihood.”
Some computer science experts said to prevent this problem from happening, users should backup Gmail messages by downloading a copy of all the messages. Users can do this by choosing “Forwarding and Pop/Imap” under Gmail’s settings.
