Google: Storage software update led to e-mail bug

Google says an update to e-mail storage software led to an unexpected bug Sunday that left tens of thousands of Gmail users without access to their messages.

Google Inc. said in a blog post late Monday night that e-mails were never actually lost, and it has restored access to many people who were affected. Google says about 0.02 percent of Gmail users encountered the problem, or two out of 10,000. Gmail has hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Google says it backs up users' information on tape. Since tapes are offline, they are protected from such software bugs.

Google vice president of engineering and site reliability czar, Ben Treynor, says Google is "sorry again for the scare."

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