Google Chrome’s password manager has accidentally lost the passwords of millions of Windows users. The problem occurred on July 24 and persisted for nearly 18 hours.
“A change in product behavior without the proper feature guard,” Google reportedly caused a problem with its password vault. The affected users could no longer find previously stored passwords through the Chrome Web browser. Furthermore, storing new passwords in the vault for a long time was impossible.
Millions of users
Exactly how many users the bug affected is difficult to determine. Chrome is by far the most popular web browser. According to the latest figures from Statcounter, Chrome has a 65.69 percent market share (June 2024). That significant number is followed by Safari at 17.98 percent.
Google rolled out the configuration change gradually, so the upgrade was only implemented for a quarter of users. Moreover, not all users running the latest version experienced problems. Google estimates that two percent of users who have already implemented the update were affected. This specifically involved users running Chrome version M127. According to estimates, the bug still affected some 15 million users.
Restarting Chrome
Google fixed the problem on July 25. “We apologize for any inconvenience this service interruption/malfunction may have caused,” the company still said. Users will automatically get the fix by restarting the browser.
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