It hasn’t been a good year for Google. Last week, there was a glitch in Google Chrome that caused over 15 million passwords to simply disappear, forcing the global tech company to publicly apologize.
Due to a bug in Chrome’s password manager feature, users were unable to use saved passwords between July 24 and 25, nor was it possible to save new passwords.
Google issued an apology for the error and stated that the problem was isolated to the M127 version of the Chrome browser on Windows. This means that a quarter of all Chrome users were affected by the problem, around 15 million of whom actively use the password manager.
When the issue first arose, Google offered a temporary solution that required users to enter an additional command when starting up Chrome. However, the problem has now been completely resolved and passwords can be fully accessed again.
Although the password manager in Google Chrome is considered to be relatively secure, this incident raises questions as to whether it’s okay to rely on a single password manager. If you want to guard yourself against such issues, you should have a backup password manager.
Related: Don’t feel bad about using Chrome’s password manager
According to the report by Forbes, Chrome’s password manager wasn’t the only failure at Google. Email verification when creating a new Google Workspace account also failed for some users.
The problem caused a lack of verification, which in the worst case could have allowed the process to be bypassed completely. This would have allowed attackers to gain unauthorized access to Google Workspace.
Further reading: The best password managers worth using
