We all are fans of cloud computing, because of its simplicity in accessing data anywhere in the world. People were singing praises to the cloud all over until suddenly one morning Gmail deleted emails for about 150,000 accounts. This was because of a bug but people panicked when all their email could not be retrieved.
The problem has been explained by Gmail it is blog, along with also commenting on it further.
Gmail’s explanation…
Gmail explains that they do have data stored at multiple locations but the bug ended up infecting systems at multiple places. This led to the various Gmail accounts being affected.
Why did the bug affect Gmail users?
Gmail released a storage update which had an unexpected bug. This bug led to emails being deleted for over 150,000 accounts. I guess over the next week, some heads will roll in the Gmail team for this bug.
Gmail has all the data backed up to physical tape which is not online and hence does not get affected with bugs. This has allowed Gmail to restore all the accounts except that it is taking them well over 40 hours now. 😐
Will Cloud computing be affected?
The answer for the short-term is yes. Especially as this has happened with Google, the champion of storing things on cloud. The new Chrome OS with all your files being stored on the cloud does not sound appealing if a bug over the weekend can wipeout your data and you cannot access the data for over 40 hours!
In the long-term, I do hope Google learns from these mishaps and improves cloud computing technology.
What are your views on this issue? Has your confidence in storing files on the cloud been shaken? Do drop in your comments.
Source: Gmail Blog
2 Comments
bad for Google. Crediblity rests on consistancy! I myself manage all official and unofficial documents, speadsheets and presentatons on Google Documents. And, had my data lost, I would have become handicapped! The lesson: Backup!!
Yup. The lesson is we need backup. But I think Cloud will become the norm very soon, but this will impact Chrome OS.