Gmail account glitch leaves tens of thousands unable to access accounts, emails

Tens of thousands of Gmail users discovered the content in their accounts had disappeared overnight, with Google suffering a major technical malfunction that blocked users from accessing accounts or from seeing many of their emails stored in the cloud.

The company confirmed the glitch is affecting less than 0.8% of users. While Google has no official data on the number of Gmail accounts currently active, various estimates show there are about 200 million in total, suggesting several thousand accounts are affected.

Google confirmed overnight that users were experiencing problems, but that no data was lost. Its engineers are currently in the process of restoring users’ accounts so they are able to access older messages.

A spokesman for the company said that it hopes to have all operations back to normal within 24 hours, saying it also expects the accounts to be fully restored.

“Today a small number of users are having difficulty accessing their Gmail accounts, and in some cases once they’re in, trouble viewing emails,” Google said.

“This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we’ve already fixed the problem for some users. Our engineers are working as quickly as possible and we hope to have everything back to normal very soon. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Google Australia was contacted about whether any local users were experiencing problems, but no region-specific information was available.

Gmail account glitches don’t happen often, but they send shockwaves through consumer and business circles when they do – about two years ago the entire Gmail infrastructure shut down, leaving millions without access to web mail services for a few hours.

More recently, popular VoIP service Skype crashed leaving millions of users stranded, unable to use their networks to make both local and international calls.

The reaction to these outages is going stronger each time they occur, as more businesses switch from dedicated software solutions to cloud-based products to save on money and resources.