Bug 'Snafu' blamed for Gmail deletion
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 03 March 2011, 19:31 IST
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New York: Google blames bug named 'snafu' for the deletion of the Gmail account as well as empty inboxes. Very recently Google reported that it has identified that small percentage of their users are unable to access their mails from 3-4 days. Ben Treynor, Vice-President, Google Engineering said in a blog posts that, "We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02 percent of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their e-mail, When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version." Google has blamed a bug for this problem that deleted an estimated 40,000 Gmail accounts. The Google named this bug as 'Snafu', which affected around 0.02 percent of the total 170 million Gmail users. Google claims that the data is not lost and can be retrieved soon for everyone but Treynor said, "I know what some of you are thinking, how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centres. Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That's what happened here," he added. According to Treynor Google saves the data on an offline tapes and they are protected by software bugs. Retrieving data from there can cake more time than usual as time goes in transferring data from one data center to another. For now Google is using the older version which is safer against bugs. Instability of software in one of Google's European data centers caused service disruption in 2009. To avoid the situation, Google introduced its App Status Dashboard to give customers more visibility into its operations. It said in one of its messages that, "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. At the moment, we are working on restoring the affected accounts. Once the restore is complete, we will start reinstating accounts and delivering messages." The next post said, "Data for the remaining 0.012 percent of affected users has been successfully restored from tapes and is now being processed," the update says. "We plan to begin moving data into mailboxes in 2 hours, and in the hours that follow users will regain access to their data. Accounts with more mail will take more time. Thanks for bearing with us." Google says that very less number of business customers have got affected and SLA credit will soon be credited.

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