The incident occurred last week and lasted nearly 18 hours until the issue was resolved on July 25.
The outage affected Windows users utilizing the M127 version of Chrome. According to Google, approximately 2% of the 25% of users impacted by the configuration change experienced this issue. Given its global reach, the number of affected users could have reached 17 million.
The technical cause of the incident was attributed to a "change in product behavior without proper feature safeguards," as explained by Google. This suggests that the company may have inadvertently released an untested update.
Google Password Manager stores user credentials in their Google accounts and offers the ability to create strong, unique passwords. Of course, this is assuming that the service does not become unavailable for nearly an entire day due to Google releasing a faulty update.
This incident highlights the risks associated with using browser-based password managers, even from large companies like Google. An alternative could be dedicated password management software, such as LastPass or Bitwarden, although they are also not immune to security issues.
This isn't the only recent security problem at Google. According to cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs, there was recently an issue with email verification when creating new Google Workspace accounts, which allowed attackers to bypass verification and impersonate domain owners on third-party services. Google quickly addressed this vulnerability within 72 hours of its discovery.
Source: Forbes, TheRegister
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