Google: Did You Lose Your Important Data Stored on Our Servers? Sorry!

The web-based RSS client powered by Google, Reader, encountered some important problems yesterday that caused the loss of numerous feeds saved by the users. Although I'm a huge fan of Google Reader and I use it every day, I wasn't among the ones affected by the vulnerability as my subscriptions were always there and accessible without any error. However, the Google Reader team informed us that an unexpected problem with the server created a 1-hour downtime in which the engineers tried to recover the information.

"This afternoon we experienced a brief outage, during which about half our users seemed to lose their subscriptions. This can happen when one of the many complex systems that power Google Reader experiences a glitch. We were able to identify, diagnose, and fix today's outage within an hour, which is the kind of response time that we strive for. The good news is that no data was actually lost, it was just temporarily inaccessible," Ben Darnell, Google Reader team, said today.

Google Reader is quite a useful solution because it allows people to read the latest news, headlines and information sent through the RSS feeds from any location. Basically, the solution is based on a web interface that helps you connect to your data using a simple Google account. Anyway, this error is quite acceptable as long as the employees manage to recover the lost information because Google Reader is still a part of the Labs, the testing platform owned by the search giant. Within Google Labs, the Mountain View company wants to release fresh ideas and projects and test them on the market before they are available as a final product. Google Reader is one of the successful tests as it managed to attract an impressive number of users.

Last week, Google rolled out a special service, codenamed Google Gears, that allows users to access a certain product even from the offline mode. Google Reader is the first lucky solution that is compatible with Gears, enabling its users to read feeds and news without an Internet connection.