It was a black Monday for Google when thousands of Gmail users lost all their correspondence and were left with an ironic 'Welcome' note in their account. All emails, chats, attachments, contacts, images and folders vanished into thin air. 

Google admits that there was a glitch in their storage software that they'd recently introduced; which caused temporary loss of data for over 0.02% Gmail users, i.e. 40,000 users approximately. 

"The good news is that email was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon." reassures Ben Treynor, Google's VP Engineering.

Google has been updating its maintenance progress on its website and has also clarified that there is a huge possibility that emails sent to affected Gmail users between 6:00 PM PST on February 27th and 2:00 PM PST on February 28th may not have been delivered at all, with a delivery failure notice to the sender. 

Its very unusual for Google to be experiencing a glitch of this magnitude with can leave a bad mark on its reputation, and on top of that, it has taken more than expected time to rectify this blunder. Here's Google's explanation on the matter:

You can read Google's blog entry on this matter where they've tried their level best to give the best explanation possible in the most subtle manner for one of the biggest blunder from their end. 

This recent glitch has made me think twice about how secure my data is online, and how I can loose all my correspondence due to a stupid bug in some software. Therefore, I decided to backup my online data, not only for Gmail but for Google docs, Facebook, Twitter and Picasa as well. Give Backupify a shot, and we will soon be coming up with a detailed review on this service.