Google apologies after Chrome bug wrecked havoc on milions of Windows machines

Last week, Google rolled out an update for Chrome on Windows that caused saved passwords to disappear for millions of users worldwide. Now, the tech giant has issued an apology saying that it is sorry for the inconvenience and shed some light on the root cause of the issue. Google said that impacted “users were unable to find passwords in Chrome’s password manager” and that while new passwords could be saved, they were not visible to users.

The Chrome bug was first reported on July 24 and affected Windows users for nearly 18 hours before Google rolled out a fix on July 25. The company said the issue surfaced because of a “change in product behaviour without proper feature guard”, which sounds similar to the Crowdstrike’s statement on the software update glitch that rendered millions of Windows PCs unusable.

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Google Chrome’s password manager bug may not be as disruptive as Crowdstrike Falcon’s sensor update, the company said the problem affected was limited to those on Chrome M127 for Windows. And while it is still unclear how many users were affected by the problem, a recent report by Forbes hints that the number is around 15 million.

And for those not in the loop, Google has already rolled out a new update that fixes the issue, so if you are affected by the problem, just update your browser to the latest version and restart it once. 

Earlier this month, Google announced that Chrome will soon start revoking permissions for websites that you haven’t visited in a while, a feature that can come in handy for users who used to follow a website but haven’t checked for some time.