A storage software update bug resulted in some Gmail users losing access to their email data over the weekend as their messages were erroneously deleted from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) servers. Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering and site reliability posted information on the company's Gmail Blog yesterday in an update on the situation. Treynor also apologized for the outage and gave his assurances that all data will be restored eventually as the company has offline data backups.

While Google initially said that less than 0.08 percent of the Gmail user base is affected, some reports say that this figure could easily represent up to 150,000 Gmail accounts. And regardless of how limited the problem is, it likely offers no comfort to someone who needs to urgently to access their email data. Ironically, Google announced in January that it is working to bring the reliability of a "telephone dial-tone" to its Google Apps platform, removing planned downtime from the Google Apps SLA. For now, affected users can track the status of their Google Mail service here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Computerworld

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