Google Ends Year On Sour Note

Google has had a rash of missteps in the last few day, leaving a negative feeling going into the new year.
First off: Google accidently deleted the inboxes of some 60 Gmail users, leaving them with none of their stored email (and, surprisingly, Google’s vaunted server architecture didn’t have any backups either). Google says it tried to salvage what it could, but was left with helping users figure out how to restore the data themselves. There’s been a belief that Google keeps multiple copies of everything, so this has to leave a lot of people with a little less trust in keeping their data on Google’s systems. At least when I blow my hard drive, it’s my fault.
Also, Orkut, which was Google’s surprise mini-success story of the year, went down for 22 hours on Friday and Saturday. It won’t tank Orkut, but Orkut used to suffer massive […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg