Some Gmail Users Are Presented with a 'Clean' Account and No Emails

A Gmail issue is affecting a small number of users, preventing them from accessing any of their emails. The users affected are presented with a 'clean' Gmail account, along with the default welcome notification, with no received, sent or saved email messages.

Google acknowledged the problem and is working on it at the moment. Still, it's been almost 14 hours now and it hasn't been fully resolved.

Initially, Google claimed that only 0.29 percent of Gmail users were affected by the issue. Later, the figure dropped to 0.08 percent, which Google said was a better estimate of the damage.

"Today a very small number of 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," Google said in a statement.

"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," it added.

The statement pretty much repeats the information from the Google Apps Status Dashboard which monitors and provides updates on the state of various Google products.

The issues started about 14 hours ago and Google has been providing updates since. It has said that the issue has been fixed for some users, but, clearly, it is still affecting others.

Gmail estimates 0.08 percent of users were affected, but that still works out at well over 100,000 people. Gmail experienced problems last week as well, but those only affected a much smaller number of users, 0.003 percent. Google Calendar was also hit with problems at the same time last week, when some users had trouble accessing saved events.