March 8, 2006
Gmail Horror Story
The authenticity of this isnt confirmed. It can be viewed here We did try to contact its writer Bob but weren't able to interview him.
I'm a regular reader of Google Blogoscoped, and yesterday, I experienced a huge shock with regards to my GMail account.
I was able to check my GMail account and emails fine at work.
However just an hour later, when I reached home and attempted to access gmail.com, I was greeted by a "Server Error" as follows:
Server Error We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem – please try logging in to your account in a few minutes.
Fine, I thought – just a small hiccup which the Google folks are working on. Over the next couple of hours I attempted to login every 15 minutes or so but to no avail. By then it was past midnight and I needed to catch up on some sleep, so I decided to head to bed and hoped that things would be resolved by the next morning (i.e. today).
I woke up earlier today, and unfortunately my expectations were dashed. By then I sensed that something was terribly wrong, as the Google folks rarely took > 12 hours to fix such a problem. I accessed the Google Accounts page (www.google.com/accounts/), and saw the following message:
The account you attempted to access has been deleted. You may click here to sign up for a new account.
A nightmare come true?! I tried logging into my Google Account via www.google.com/accounts/Login but was presented with an invalid username/password error.
I tried to reset my password, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the following:
There are no accounts in our system with the E-mail address usermame[put at-character here]gmail.com which you entered.
Has my Google account really been deleted? I use it religiously and it is my primary email account. I have over 300mb of CRUCIAL data in my email, none of which I have backups for.
I tried to send an email to my GMail account from another email account, but the email bounced.
Any ideas as to what I should do? This is an emergency for me. :/
