Were you among the unlucky .8% of GMail users whose accounts were affected by a recent spate of chat and email deletions?

If so, you should have access to all the previously unavailable data thought to have possibly been consumed by the cloud. After nearly five days of uncertainty, Google added a late night/early morning update (1:51 AM) to its Apps Status Dashboard, confirming data had been restored for most affected users:

The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

However, some users may be experiencing unspecified other ongoing problems with their GMail accounts related to Sunday’s service disruption. The update continued:

Gmail should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com. Thanks again for bearing with us.

If you were affected by the service issues, has your account returned to normal? If not, what hasn’t yet been resolved?

Google says data restored for all GMail accounts is a post from: The Inquisitr

What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and all your saved GMail information was gone?

That is not the plot of a new scary movie- it actually happened to almost 1% of GMail users, users who as of now are unable to access their stored GMail and old chats. Engadget described the horror, initially estimating 500,000 affected users but revising it down to 150,000- still staggering:

“[150K] Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven’t experienced the issue personally, we’re hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages.”

The problem has yet to be completely resolved, and Engadget says Google’s prognosis has been “promising but terribly vague [about] when the situation will be resolved.” Are you one of the unlucky .8%? Would a GMail account deletion be catastrophic for you, or merely an inconvenience?

Worst fears confirmed- 150K lose all saved GMails, chats is a post from: The Inquisitr

Something very strange is going on with Google this morning. Most Google-related services appear to be either down or barely functioning as of Thursday morning.

Even the google.com home page is barely loading, if at all, for many users. Gmail, Google Reader, Google News, and most every other common Google application seems to be suffering similarly.

A quick poll on Twitter confirmed I’m far from the only one experiencing this seemingly widespread outage. I’ve placed calls, e-mails, and tweets to try to get some answers as to what’s happening. If and when I hear anything, I’ll pass it along here.

The SANS Internet Storm Center now reports the Google-wide outage has been going on for about an hour, since about 10:45 EDT.

Update: Massive discussion going on via Twitter: #googlefail and gmailfail.

Update: Google services seem to be (more or less) back online as of about 12:20 p.m. ET. No official word on a cause yet. There’s some speculation via Twitter that the issue may be specific to AT&T Internet customers, though that information has not been confirmed.

Update: Google is “looking into” the issues and promising a full update sometime soon (via the first official statement). Everything appears to be back to normal at this point.

Google Outage Appears to be Over; No Explanation Thus Far is a post from: The Inquisitr

Gmail Outage: The Latest

Google says the Gmail problem is now fully resolved, though you may have to fill in a CAPTCHA box before being able to access your account once again. As for what actually happened, Google doesn’t have a whole lot of answers just yet.

“We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could,” writes Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager. “Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.”

Cruz went on to say that he wanted to “stress that this [was] an unusual occurrence.”

Gmail previously suffered a significant outage about six months ago, in August of 2008.

Google Releases Update on Gmail Downtime is a post from: The Inquisitr