Google Chrome temporarily “forgot” the passwords of 15 million Windows users

Last week, the Google Chrome browser experienced a massive outage that resulted in millions of Windows users temporarily losing access to their saved passwords. The problem lasted for about 18 hours and affected those who had version 127 of the browser installed.

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According to Forbes, Google attributed the July 24 outage to a “change in product behavior without proper feature protection” that resulted in users being unable to find and save passwords. The issue is estimated to affect about 2% of Chrome 127 users on Windows, which is about 15 million people. However, based on the fact that more than 3 billion people use the Chrome web browser, this figure could be higher.

The temporary solution to the problem proposed by Google required launching the browser through the command line with the “enable-features=SkipUndecryptablePasswords” flag, which turned out to be, to put it mildly, not very convenient for most users. However, the company quickly responded and on July 25 released a full fix for the error, requiring only a restart of the browser.

«We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused,” Google said, also advising users who are experiencing the impact to contact Google Workspace support.