Google has apologised for the Gmail reset bug that seemingly deleted many users' email and chat correspondence history.

On Monday we reported how as many as 500,000 Gmail users had been affected by the error, although Google now claims that only 0.02 per cent of users would have experienced any issues (around 40,000).

Uncle Goog has also re-assured Gmailers that no correspondence has been deleted for good, as everything gets backed up on offline tape. The search giant did admit though that multiple data centres had been affected by the bug.

"I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centres," read a post from Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar on the Google blog.

"Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.

"The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon."

The bug was caused by a new software version, which has since been scrapped.

Were you a victim of the Gmail bug? Let us know if you've got your emails back using the comments below.