Google says Gmail data partially restored

Google on Monday said it has restored email messages of thousands of Gmail users affected by data outages since Sunday. Google, however, declined to give the exact number of users affected or the number of messages restored.

Google said a buggy software has affected 0.02 per cent of Gmail users and that it would recover all lost messages and restore service for affected users soon.

Google said the disruption, which was originally estimated to have affected 0.02 per cent of Gmail users, has since come down to 0.008 per cent and that it was in the process of restoring these.

"Data for the remaining 0.012 per cent of affected users has been successfully restored from tapes and is now being processed," Google said in an update.

"We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02 per cent of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their e-mail," Google engineering VP Ben Treynor said in a blog post on Monday.

"When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version," he added.