Passwords Stored in Chrome Vanish for Millions of Windows Users

Think you could go nearly a day without any of your saved passwords? That’s the pickle millions of Windows users found themselves in last week when their credentials stored in Google Chrome suddenly vanished. According to a Google Workspace incident report, a bug caused the Chrome password manager to malfunction for just under 18 hours before engineers rolled out a fix.

The bug was limited to the M127 version of Chrome, which Google released on July 23. M127 was supposed to smooth over some security vulnerabilities and crash risks, but it appears the release had some pitfalls of its own. On the afternoon of July 24, after about a quarter of Chrome users updated to M127, roughly 2% of that subset saw their stored passwords disappear from the browser’s built-in password manager. They couldn’t add new credentials to the password manager, either.

Many Chrome users immediately took to message boards for troubleshooting assistance, believing the bug was on their end alone. “For some reason all my passwords from google password manager are all gone,” reads one Reddit post from Wednesday. “Google Password Manager is broken on my Chrome browser,” another person wrote. “No passwords are visible, and the count is at zero.” Some users aired their grievances via Google Chrome Help’s community board, where product support managers indicated Google was aware of the issue and working on a resolution.

Credit: Adrianna Nine

Google eventually offered a band-aid solution, which required launching Chrome with a specific command line to skip undecryptable passwords. But not everyone is comfortable working with the Windows command prompt; even for those who are, this is a tedious way to launch your preferred browser. Eventually Google rolled out a server-side update that only required users to restart the browser. By the time the issue was resolved Thursday morning, Chrome users on Windows had missed their saved passwords for 17 hours and 51 minutes.

“We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption/outage may have caused,” the Google Workspace team wrote in its incident report. 

The vanishing passwords issue was yet another curveball in a stressful month for Windows users. It also illustrated the value of third-party password management software—though those certainly have their issues, too.