It seemed like everything was love and roses after Gmail reportedly fixed a glitch that caused tens of thousands of Gmail accounts to be wiped clean. However, Google admits, there are still some who don’t have access to any of their old e-mails.
On the scope of the total number of Gmail users – which is in the millions – the number seems relatively small. A few thousand people have not yet recovered from the freak glitch. Without any other perspective, though, A few thousand is a huge number.
For Google, the majority of the problem seemed to be taken care of after it ran a simple algorithm that placed hard-copy backup tapes into the system and restored all e-mails to accounts that appeared to be effective.
That process only went so far, though, and left about 40,000 people still without any access to years’ worth of e-mail exchanges. Google said that the majority of those would be taken care of earlier this week.
Yet there are still accounts that haven’t been restored. At this point, Google is asking users affected by the glitch to contact it directly, because from there it can simply pull the backup file and restore the account manually. However, without getting specific info about whose e-mails were wiped clean, it’s tough for Google to figure it out. The company’s formulas for automatically determining who got hit didn’t identify everyone.
The glitch – which was unique because not only did it wipe out data from Gmail’s main server, but it also cleared it out of online backup servers as well – happened about a week ago.
