It seems like Google wasn’t too sure when it removed that BETA tag from the Gmail logo, and now the users of the service actually experienced it.

Yesterday morning many Gmail users woke up to a find a nightmare with their Gmail account. When they logged into their account, there were no emails, no history of email sent, no labels. It was just like they have freshly created their accounts and were greeted with “Welcome to Gmail” message, much like a new account.

Users obviously panicked and were all over Google support forums and over Twitter stream. Google has responded to the issue saying:

Today a very small number users are having difficulty accessing their Gmail accounts, and in some cases once they’re in, trouble viewing emails. This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we’ve already fixed the problem for some individuals. Our engineers are working as quickly as possible and we hope to have everything back to normal soon. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience to our customers.

While every alternate person over the web would rant the same “Cloud is always Evil” slogan, these mishaps are inevitable sometimes. What you can do as a user of these services, to protect your important emails, is that you can take an offline backup of your Gmail or Backup your emails from one account to another.

Did you also faced the same problem? Or have you been a victim of such a horrible disaster in the past? Was there a backup service which saved your day in such an incident? Do let us know in the comments.

(via readwriteweb)