An extreme issue was identified with the password manager in Google Chrome. For 18 hours, users were affected by a major outage where their credentials vanished. The disruption, which affected Windows users worldwide, made them quite frustrated. Chrome OS and macOS users were not affected by the problem.
Well, Google managed to trace the problem to a bug in the M127 version of Chrome for Windows, which was another of the latest stable releases. After realizing the bug, Google apologized and then made another fix. It said that at least 2% of the 25% user base affected by the change in question reported problems with accessing their passwords.
This was a temporary solution to enable Google Chrome with the correct command-line flag. Users report that, until then, they had to use –enable-features=SkipUndecryptablePasswords if they wanted to see their passwords again. Fortunately, Google fixed it pretty fast, and access was restored after a browser restart.
This strongly proved that there should be backup solutions for information of importance. Relying on a single password manager sometimes puts the person in a dilemma, as was evident in this outage. Users are advised to explore alternative methods of storing and securing passwords.
Although the fact that Google reacted so quickly means that there were no long-term issues, this does remind us of the importance of thinking about backup strategies for important data in order to avoid falling into such pitfalls in the future. Those still experiencing problems should reach out to Google Workspace Support for further assistance.
