Google Apologize After Chrome Bug Caused Havoc To Millions Of Windows Machines

Google released an update to the Chrome browser  that  crashed the Password Manager of the browser, causing havoc for millions of users. For around 18 hours, they couldn’t access their password credentials to log in to online accounts.

Google’s new update affected nearly millions of user

Google apologized to Chrome users, said sorry for the inconvenience, “ From the preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue is a change in product behavior without proper feature guard. Google engineers mitigated the issue by deploying a fix,”

The bug was first realized on July 24 and had affected Windows users for nearly 18 hours before  Google fixed it on July 25. As per the Google company’s statement, the crash sounds similar to Crowdstrike’s statement on the software update glitch that rendered millions of Windows PCs unusable. Although it may not be as disruptive as Crowdstrike Falcon’s sensor update. 

Google apologizes to Chrome users

According to the company  the problem affected was limited to those on Chrome M127 for Windows.

The good news is Google has already rolled out a new update that fixes the issue. If you are affected by the problem, just update your browser to the latest version and restart it once.

Google said that “We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption/outage may have caused.” and if any Chrome users who are facing impact beyond their control they can directly contact Google Workspace support.

Number of users affected

The actual estimate is still vague and difficult to find. However, working on the basis that there are more than 3 billion Chrome web browser users, with Windows users counting for the vast majority of these, it’s possible to come up with an estimated number. Google said that 25% of the user base saw the configuration change rolled out, which, by my calculations, is around 750 million. Of these, around 2%, according to Google’s estimation, were hit by the password manager issue. That means around 15 million users have seen their passwords vanish into thin air.

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