Google: Gmail access restored soon to all affected

Google said late Monday that it would have e-mail access restored to those who found themselves locked out of their accounts due to a glitch in a storage update applied to Gmail servers on Sunday. The company noticed the update was malfunctioning and pulled it before it could cause additional trouble.

As opposed to the .08% of all Gmail users affected, Google revised that number down to .02%. This translates to about 34,000 or so locked out of their accounts, versus the 136,000 originally thought to be affected.

The good news for those affected is that even though some data was lost, no customers would lose any contacts, e-mails or other data due to redundancies. There's some bad news, though: any e-mails sent to affected accounts would be bounced back to the senders during the outage.

"Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon," vice president of engineering Ben Treynor wrote in a blog post Monday. "Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare."

According to the Google Apps status blog, as of Tuesday afternoon service had not fully been restored. This would mean some users were approaching 48 hours without e-mail access.

Treynor promised a full report on the incident on the status page, as well as steps the company will take to prevent the issue from happening again.