It appears that all lost data are recoverable, so the damage to the affected accounts will remain limited.
All in all, Gmail remains my e-mail service of choice. Switched a couple of years ago, and never looked back. No need to.
Google has followed seemingly similar steps to Microsoft in a recent outage, which now affects around 150,000 Gmail users, deleting not only their emails but folders, personalised settings, labels and themes too.
Engineers have been working on this since the early hours, according to the company, while they state that less than 0.1% of all users are affected.
Google Apps users, including Google Apps for Education users, are also under the affected umbrella, but thankfully most students should have slept through the outage, as students sleep on average 109% of the time (gratuitous joke).
Many students, though using Microsoft’s Live@edu service and other college and university in-house services to manage their email, link in to Gmail for additional storage.
Nevertheless, this will be a significant blow to the public relations of the company, with Gmail as one of the worlds most used free web based email services.
In credit to Google, however, it updated its Dashboard pages over the weekend to acknowledge the problem, whereas Microsoft resorted to taking to the convoluted forums it hosts on their own problem pages, when it suffered an outage over the New Year break.
Is the cloud the best place to store email? Or would you prefer to manage your own in a private cloud set-up? Have your say.
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