Google is one of the biggest browsing platforms and a default one for most of us. We often also save our passwords with auto-save so that we don’t have to remember them all the time and they get automatically filled out. But recently a bug on the platform made a lot of people lose out on their passwords.
A bug caused this issue and it affected a lot of Windows users. The issue started on July 24 and lasted for nearly 18 hours before being resolved on July 25. Various users were unable to find their saved passwords on the platform. As per Google, this was a result of “a change in product behaviour without proper feature guard.”
Also read: Scammers are targeting CrowdStrike outage victims: How to stay safe
This does sound a lot similar to the CrowdStrike issue that happened a couple of days back. Users not only lost out on their old passwords, but they were unable to save new ones too. As per Google, only the M127 version users of the Chrome Browser on Windows were affected by this.
The company further revealed that 25% of its user base experienced the configuration change, which means approximately 750 million users. Out of these, around 2% were impacted by the password manager issue. This means that around 15 million users were affected by the issue.
To this, Google responded by providing a process that involved the re-launching of the Chrome browser with a command line flag: “—enable-features=SkipUndecryptablePasswords.” This was only an interim solution and a complete fix has now been implemented. Users can restart their chromes to fix it.
Also read: Cybersecurity platform Crowdstrike down worldwide, many users logged out of systems
Google issued a statement wherein it thanked its users for being patient and even apologised for the inconvenience that was caused to them. It even asked users to contact Google Workspace Support for further assistance, if they were still facing the issue.
