NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Imagine opening up your e-mail and finding years of correspondence gone. As many as 150,000 Gmail users have been confronting that scary scenario throughout the past day. Around 3:00 pm ET Sunday, Google began "investigating reports of an issue" with its popular e-mail service. Over the next few hours, it confirmed that a small fraction of Gmail users were experiencing disruptions.
At this time, it isn't known if Google will be able to restore the lost data. Customers are carrying on, and it's understandable. Years of correspondence, pictures, contacts and information lost. It's also preventable. It's one of the first basic truths of the digital world: you are ultimately responsible for your own backups. Backups are free, inconvenient, time consuming and in every way obnoxious. Without them you are utterly lost and at the whim of the people providing your service. Even the best of the best are subject to glitches. Gmail offers downloading of messages, so it is hard to make the argument that the customers are owed something for a malfunction of a free service. One has to wonder if this was a glitch or an attack. I'm also curious to see if Google will suffer the outcome or conveniently find a backup of user's private emails. Either way, this is going to be interesting.
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