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June 11, 2007

Data Loss At Google Reader

Michael Arrington

96 comments »

It looks like Google has a major problem with their Google Reader product today. Reports are flying on blogs, twitter and elsewhere that feeds have been deleted from people’s accounts.

We have an email in to Google PR for comment - Google representatives are responding on this Google Groups thread discussing the problem. Some users are now reporting that their feed subscriptions are coming back, so perhaps Google reverted to a backup or they have restored the cluster. Something similar happened with Gmail last year, although the problem only affected a small number of users.

We’re trying to figure out if any users were not affected. Let us know if your feeds seem intact.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Zoli's Blog

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:00 pm

  2. TechCrunch Japanese

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:20 pm

  3. Deepak dot com » Blog Archive » What happened to your reader, Google?

    June 12th, 2007 at 9:45 am

  4. Google Reader Suffers Down Time

    June 25th, 2007 at 6:16 am

  5. WinExtra » Off the Cuff: living dangerously, 3D mail & Stuff

    May 9th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

Comments

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  1. Steven Price

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Hey,

    Fortunately, my feeds were intact today. Nothing strange happened besides some feeds that I marked as read in the morning appeared as new later in the evening. :)

  2. Allen Stern

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    My only question is:

    Since the cat is gone at Twitter, did it get into Google Reader?

    ok, another question:

    What will Scoble do if he loses 622 feeds?!?!?!

  3. Bryan Bisel

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    I guess I was one of the lucky ones. I have been in Reader just about all day (following the WWDB Keynote) and have had no issues.
    Cheers

  4. pqbon

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    I have about ~120 feeds so one or two could have gone missing but I don’t see anything not there. All the site I really care about seem to still be there if nothing else.

  5. Jeff

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:26 pm

    Mine disappeared today, I went back about an hour later and they were there. It was alarming.

  6. Tim Moore

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:27 pm

    No problems here.

  7. Tien Nguyen

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:28 pm

    Exactly what Bryan said..I’m kind of afraid to refresh it actually.

  8. Bob Morris

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

    My 141 feeds are ok.

    Everyone: You are backing regularly up your feeds as an opml file in case something happens, right?

  9. AJ

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    Mine were ok.

  10. Scott Johnson

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:41 pm

    All 267 feeds intact+present here.

  11. Adam Israel

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    I was one of the folks twittering about my Google Reader subscriptions disappearing. After 20 or 30 minutes they reappeared safe and sound. A minor glitch that reminded me the importance of exporting my feed list!

  12. Sebastian Moser

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    Everything’s OK here. No feeds missing, just the Official Google Blog became unread in the last three hours.

  13. mark

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    all fine here.

  14. dave

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    I noticed some feeds had disappeared earlier today. I had just started re-subscribing, then they all re-appeared.

  15. Mike

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    I’ve never had any disappear, but either last week or the week before some feeds were reappearing. Today, the only problem I have had is items not getting marked as read when I mark them.

    Think I’ll back them up now…

  16. Psycho

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    mine were fine too

  17. Jeremy Thomas

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

    No problems for me, although I’m in Australia and accessed my feeds at the equivalent of 3:30 pm PST.

  18. jenn

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    all 95 intact and updating; in usa, in case that helps.

  19. Thomas

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

    from 2-2:50 my feeds were wiped out. Then poof they were back. Really strange

  20. Hatim

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm

    Have been accessing my feeds for the last 15 hours and didn’t notice anything…
    But they were some glitches last week with some read items reappearing or some of the feeds not updating properly.

    They also released a new version of the Offline reader today. Maybe the two are related!

  21. Cesar Cardoso

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm

    Hm, all feeds intact here.

  22. Eoin

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    Mine were fine. No issues at all.

  23. Jason Adams

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    All of my feeds stayed intact — I’ve been checking it all day with no interruption in service.

  24. Peluka

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

    Same as most of you, no disappeared feeds, but looks like there are less new items than usual. I thought it was because everybody was reading the Apple news or trying Safari instead of writing.

  25. Amos

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:38 pm

    My feeds were not affected.

    When this happens I often wonder if it certain users affected by their name. i.e. perhaps everone who has their name starting with the letters M - R were affected, but not anyone A-L or S-Z. Silly, but a recurring thought.

    Amos

  26. shawnw

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:41 pm

    According to several posts over at Google Groups, this has already been resolved. Of course, not everyone affected is posting there, but those who were posting seem to be replying with a resounding “it’s fixed!” response.

  27. bsquared

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    My feeds have been fine. Read and refreshed as normal.

  28. Kin Lane

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:44 pm

    My data was gone for about 30 minutes……my account was still there and my tags. However none of my 400+ subscribed feeds were available.

    While I was looking for a good place to bitch about it, boom it came back.

  29. Jason

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    I was in all day and all my 200+ feeds seemed to be there.

  30. Dalbir

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

    Mine were gone from about 2:00 - 2:45…back now

  31. Austin Storm

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    Totally fine. I only check it at 10, 2 and 4 PST though.

  32. Thomas Han

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    truly amazing how fast this incident spread via twitter. Good thing Chris W. was on twitter and quickly responded to this…

  33. vepari

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    All disappeared around 2:00 pm but trickled back and all were back by 3:00.

  34. Sina

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

    It was down for a while, with all my feed missing, but now it’s all back up there again.

  35. Thomas

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    Well, I read this story in my in-tact Google Reader list, so what does that tell ya? :) No problems here.

  36. Carina

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    I don’t seem to have lost any feeds, tags, or any other info. I might have missed whenever they went out, though, as some people have reported their feeds only being out for an hour… but I think they’ve been intact the whole time.

  37. Shannon Clark

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:20 pm

    I think my feed are intact BUT I did notice some difficulties earlier syncing my offline (google gears) with the online - but it all appears now to be working.

    I wonder if the problem was gears related?

    Shannon

  38. Emily

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    i too read this in my google reader and everything looks intact so far. crossing my fingers…

  39. bdb

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    Is there a chance this has to do with some sort of tighter integration with Feedburner/adwords?

    Seems like a good posibility, but you all are the experts…do tell.

  40. Matt Blodgett

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    My feeds seem totally fine.

    I also originally read this post in Google Reader.

    :)

  41. KellyK

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:38 pm

    Bob Morris commented, “Everyone: You are backing regularly up your feeds as an opml file in case something happens, right?” - Can someone provide instructions on how to do this?

  42. Colin Henderson

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    It happened for me at 4:30pm EST …. every feed disppeared except three (I have 121 feeds)

    I decided to stay calm. I cleaned out my cookies, and closed Swiftfox (Firefox). Within 2 or 3 minutes it gradually all came back and within 5 minutes, panic over.

    For the record, days like today, make me trust Google even more. I am guessing they were re-configuring data centers or something like that.

  43. Tim Cooper

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    Mine seem to be there…

  44. Colin Henderson

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    PS … I am in Toronto Canada.

  45. tapster

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    no problem here too. I did notice that feeds were incredibly delayed yesterday.. I actually had to visit a real site or two - oh the inconvenience ;)… not sure if that’s related or not

  46. Colin Henderson

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    @KellyK - to back up - go to settings, ‘import/export’. Look for export to OPML file. That file saved to your hard drive contains all your feeds and could be imported to Google Reader or any other feed reader. Hope that helps.

  47. Jim Russell

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

    I’ve been in the Reader all day today (including reading this post) with no issues.

  48. sam

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

    My feeds were not affected at all, like many of the people posting here :)

  49. Luis Henrique

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    I think that nothing is wrong with my feeds too..

  50. Vivek

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:58 pm

    All is fine for me.

  51. KellyK

    June 11th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    Colin: Thanks for the help!

  52. Wayne

    June 11th, 2007 at 6:10 pm

    All fine here…40 feeds intact

  53. Jacob

    June 11th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

    No problems here, though I only have 6 feeds…

  54. Nick Baum

    June 11th, 2007 at 6:45 pm

    Hi all,

    No data was lost, and everything is back to normal. For more details, see the official Google Reader blog:

    http://googlereader.blogspot.c.....utage.html

    Sorry for the inconvenience,

    -Nick (Product Manager, Google Reader)

  55. Bruno Aguiar

    June 11th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

    my google reader its ok…

  56. sindhu

    June 11th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

    its hard to say, because i have 204+ feed subscriptions. but i remember i did have all my friends ‘ blog feeds subscribed to. but somehow one of them was missing, and i had add him back today.

    also the saving of changes to a feed (like the addition to a tag/folder) is terribly slow and sometimes unresponsive.

  57. elfmoogle

    June 11th, 2007 at 7:30 pm

    my feeds were all intact (no clue how many I have, probably around 70). I’m intrigued by the comment about backing up feeds though.. I’ll have to try that, since I don’t want to have to find all my feeds should something like this occur and it ends up I do have something happen to my feeds. :P

  58. Jason Sares

    June 11th, 2007 at 7:42 pm

    Mine have been fine all day.

  59. anonymous coward

    June 11th, 2007 at 8:33 pm

    With all this “feed reading”, when do any of you have time for an original thought?

    This question is both rhetorical and ironical :)

  60. elfmoogle

    June 11th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    what’s funny is now my feeds are all gone. LOL.

  61. Ramesh Bhaskar

    June 11th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

    Nothing missing. Kinda agree with “anonymous coward” on the point of an original thought.

  62. Gnet

    June 11th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

    Nothing here either i got techcrunch on google reader

  63. David

    June 11th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Same here, everything is cool!

  64. AndrewB

    June 11th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    Yep all my feeds seem to be fine - never missed a beat and it was open all day at work :)

  65. David Kadouch

    June 11th, 2007 at 10:43 pm

    Feeds are OK. Google reader rocks!

  66. Mark

    June 11th, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    No problems at all here - so far :)

  67. Raman VikramAdith

    June 11th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    Mine be fine. Or I wouldn’t have read this article.

  68. Daliso

    June 11th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    In a related incident, my Google home page widgets got wiped out a few months ago mysteriously. I had to rebuild it from scratch…very frustrating

  69. Arek

    June 11th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    I’m using Google Reader in Poland. Everything is OK, so far.

  70. eLd0raDo

    June 11th, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    All OK here as well. All my feeds are there.
    But the app itself has outages, the counts are not right after reading a feed and the main page does not load.

  71. Priya

    June 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am

    All good here, I hope the lost feeds are soon found. :P

  72. Allen

    June 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am

    Actually reader was fine, but lost all data to my Google Notebook this morning. Just checked and everything is back to normal. Good Work google.

  73. phann

    June 12th, 2007 at 12:42 am

    Everything seems a-ok here.

  74. L3ST

    June 12th, 2007 at 1:00 am

    My feeds are ok, I guess I’m lucky :)

  75. Servaas

    June 12th, 2007 at 2:15 am

    Mine are still ok. I had it a couple of weeks back, though. But they all magically reappeared…

  76. arnique

    June 12th, 2007 at 3:29 am

    My feeds are perfectly fine. Guess I was lucky then. Cheers.

  77. RYK

    June 12th, 2007 at 3:37 am

    I think Google doesn’t ever loose any data as they keep backups. They appear however to take sometime to restore from a back-up. And one the restore is done, its all back to normal with no data loss

  78. Rojs

    June 12th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    No problem with my feeds disappearing (yet).

    They still haven’t fixed the slow updating of major feeds like slashdot. Can go for hours without updating.

  79. Donal

    June 12th, 2007 at 5:33 am

    No problems with disappearing feeds for me. My only issue is feeds re-appearing and being marked as read. Regularly happens with Tech Crunch and any post with YouTube in it.

  80. Donal

    June 12th, 2007 at 5:35 am

    …marked as unread I mean.

  81. Concrete Stain

    June 12th, 2007 at 6:27 am

    as - far as I can read (80% of 80 comments)

    - google had a glitch / and fixed it will minimal impact

  82. Casey Atherton

    June 12th, 2007 at 6:59 am

    All of my feeds seem to be in place. Just to be safe though, I downloaded a backup.

    I do, however, have the same issue as Donal, sometimes items I’ve read will show up again in my list.

  83. Brad Balfour

    June 12th, 2007 at 7:16 am

    All my feeds were fine yesterday. last night and today.

  84. alex

    June 12th, 2007 at 8:44 am

    i’m fine…

  85. Slaptijack

    June 12th, 2007 at 9:04 am

    A-OK here!

  86. Benedikt

    June 12th, 2007 at 9:58 am

    My feeds are all fine, maybe they were only temporarily gone…

  87. Dave M.

    June 12th, 2007 at 10:10 am

    All my feeds seem fine to me. I didn’t notice anything unusual at all.

  88. IndianMonk

    June 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am

    My feeds are fine. I had Reader open starting 9am EST.

  89. Dan

    June 12th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    My Google Reader feeds only show in Internet Explorer! In Firefox, everything is blank except for the settings page where it looks like normal.

  90. Victoria S.

    June 21st, 2007 at 8:46 am

    Hi!

    It seems that not only files on computers can get lost but even Google feeds.
    Unfortunately I don’t know any way to back them up yet, but this site’s always up to date with Backup methods for files, mobilephone, PDA, …

    http://www.onlinebackupguide.com/

    I think it’d be useful to bookmark this page and visit it from time to time to check what’s new and if there’s an easy way to backup Google feeds. They’ll have it first :)

  91. PS

    June 26th, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    I just had this issue June 24th, before the 24th my Reader was perfectly fine. As of today (26th) my subscriptions have still not come back…

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