Google says it’s working to restore lost e-mail, messages

NEW YORK – Google has restored e-mail service and messages to some of the users who had found their old e-mails deleted on Sunday.

Google Inc. first posted a notice about the problem Sunday afternoon on a site where it informs users of service problems on applications such as e-mail. The company says the problem affected about 0.02 percent of Gmail users, or two of every 10,000. That’s down from its earlier estimate that 0.29 percent, or 29 of every 10,000.

Google did not say how many users this translates to, only that its Gmail service has “hundreds of millions” of users around the world. That would mean that tens of thousands – 20,000 out of every 100 million – users were affected.

The company said Monday afternoon it had restored access to a third of the users affected and estimated that all the remaining problems would be fixed by early this morning. Although the message losses were only temporary, the breakdown illustrates just how dependent people are on free e-mail services such as Gmail.