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Anecdotal evidence gathered from discussion forums indicates that Google began rolling out a fix to the problem at around 3 a.m. ET on Friday, almost 24 hours after the problem erupted, although the glitch seems to still be affecting some users at press time early Friday afternoon ET.

The company didn't declare the problem solved until almost 2 p.m. ET Friday, about 32 hours after the first problem reports started surfacing. "A number of Google users had difficulty accessing their settings and preferences on the personalized version of their homepages over the past day," a spokeswoman said. "Users should have their personalized homepages restored at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our users. We know how important Google Personalized Homepage is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously."

In the statement, Google didn't disclose how many users were affected, nor did it offer an explanation of what happened. "This affected a relatively small group of users, and we believe this to be an isolated incident," the spokeswoman said.

Personalized Home Page is a free service that lets users turn Google.com into a customized portal by adding to it syndicated content feeds as well as "gadget" applications, turning it into a user's hub for Web content, online services, and applications.

Florian Brunner, a student at HTL Leonding technical and vocational college in Leonding, Austria, was among those affected and said the problem was more annoying than disruptive. "I can work without the page, but I can't live without it. All my important information is on one site. Fast and simple," Brunner said. With the Personalized Home Page, Brunner can access multiple Google services without going to their individual sites.

The problem, of apparently significant proportions, erupted at around 6 a.m. ET on Thursday, when angry users began flocking to discussion forums to report that their home pages had either reverted to old versions or to their original default settings.

Users complained about lost productivity and missing data, but throughout Friday morning, many reported in discussion forums that their Google home pages had been restored, although some said the problem hadn't been fixed for them as late as 1:14 pm ET.

In a number of forum postings, users called on Google to offer an explanation for the problem and to let them save their Personalized Home Page settings to their PCs so that the settings can be restored even if they get wiped out on Google servers.

Episodes such as this one have affected other Google services recently, leading some to question the company's ability to provide robust availability for its online services, particularly for those for which it offers uptime guarantees, like the paid version of Google Apps, the suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications for businesses of all sizes.