Google/Gmail Glitch: Thousands Of Emails Was Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account

It seems Google/Gmail’s bad day continues. Following hour long outage causing millions of people without access to their email accounts, a glitch in Google Search and Gmail caused thousands of email to be sent to single Hotmail user. The particular user’s Hotmail account was indexed by Google and linked to top search result when someone searches for Gmail in Google.

As you can see in the image above, when someone clicks the Email link, a Gmail compose window opens with this particular Hotmail address in the To field. Due to this case, thousands of people who had their compose window opened started sending blank emails to his account.

TechCrunch spoke to this poor guy,

Another Google search surfaces who this address belongs to: one David S. Peck of Fresno, California. We even found his resume.

We spoke to Mr. Peck on the phone just now, and he says he’s been receiving thousands of emails, the majority of which are blank.

“I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails,” he says. “500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them.”

The issue actually started yesterday, he says, and he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.

Peck will not see their reply anytime soon, it seems.

The Hotmail address is his main account, and he’s now missing his important emails while under this deluge. “They’re coming so fast, I want to stop them. I deleted everything last night and woke up this morning and had 1,900 new emails” he says. “Only two of them were emails I cared about,” he says.

Google confirmed this glitch with the following statement,

“Due to a technical glitch, some email addresses on public webpages appeared too prominently in search results. We’ve fixed the issue and are sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Source: TechCrunch