Google’s email service was recently struck with a nasty bug that resulted in inadvertent deletion of some emails and other related issues. The issue reportedly happened days before the downtime that struck the service a few days back.
The bug led to deletion of emails, spam in the form of email being sent to a different email address, mislabeling of important messages as Trash or Spam. Google started notifying the users about this glitch that is said to have occurred between January 15 to 22.
The affected users were notified with the following message, as published by The Verge–
You may have been impacted by a recent issue in Gmail that inadvertently caused some actions (e.g. delete, report spam) taken while viewing a message to be applied to a different message. The issue occurred between January 15 and January 22 and is now fixed.
The company has apologised for any kind of inconvenience and is encouraging the users to check the Trash and Spam folders before Feb 14, for any message not intended to be deleted and move it back to Inbox. Google has confirmed that the bug has impacted only users of Gmail iOS app, mobile browsers and the Gmail Offline version in a desktop browser, clearly stating that not all users were affected.
It seems like the Google server is experiencing technical difficulties lately as this news of the Gmail iOS bug, comes just days after the massive outage, which hit Gmail, Google Talk, Google+, Google Groups and other services. Google servers were down for around 30 minutes affecting approximately 10% of its users. Google claimed it to be a bug that caused an internal system to generate and incorrect configuration.