Google confirms it broke password manager on Chrome for millions of Windows users

Google has confirmed its responsible for breaking the Chrome Password Manager for millions of Windows users with a seemingly faulty update.

Google confirms it broke password manager on Chrome for millions of Windows users
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Tech and Science Editor
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Following the tragic CrowdStrike outage that converted approximately 8.5 million Windows machines into devices that continuously flash the notorious blue screen of death, Google has confirmed it was responsible for Chrome Password Manager temporarily breaking.

Google confirms it broke password manager on Chrome for millions of Windows users 651556

Between potentially millions of Intel CPUs being faulty, AMD's new CPUs having problems, CrowdStrike updates nuking millions of Windows machines around the globe that results in airports being held up, and billions of dollars in lost revenue, it really does feel the technology industry is breaking at the seams. And to throw more fuel on the bad news fire, Google has confirmed its responsible for Password Manager on the Chrome browser being faulty.

While password manager being disabled certainly isn't as critical as the CrowdStrike outage that brought down various infrastructures around the world, the user base that was affected was comparable, and perhaps comedically it was only Windows users that were affected. According to Google, the glitch happened last week and lasted 18 hours, which was the time it took engineers to officially sign off on the fix.

Google confirms it broke password manager on Chrome for millions of Windows users 651165156

Google said, "The root cause of the issue is a change in product behavior without proper feature guard." That corporate speak, translated through my personal filter, reads, "We rolled out a faulty driver update."

The impact of the outage was global and the total number of affected users could range in the millions. Reports indicate that International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated 5.4 billion people use the internet in 2023 and of those Chrome holds a market share of 65.68%, per StatCounter.

Notably, the glitch was exclusive to Windows users on the M127 version of Chrome browser, and according to Google, "Approximately 2 percent of users out of the 25 percent of the entire user base where the configuration change was rolled out, experienced this issue." This would put the estimated number of affected users at approximately 17 million.

Furthermore, Google Password Manager's downtime prevented users from finding saved passwords, generating new passwords, or accessing the features. An event such as this highlights the importance of independent password managers and diversifying reliance across multiple applications for the storing of sensitive data.

Google took to its Workspace dashboard to write on July 30 that the company has decided to downgrade the severity of this incident to "Service Information," as the issue affected "significantly" fewer users than the company initially estimated.

While the outage may be less severe than initially thought, it has come at an unfortunate time following the CrowdStrike debacle, as consumer confidence in the reliability of big tech platforms is quite low.

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Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100s of new tech products and kept us informed daily on the latest science, space, and artificial intelligence news. Jak's love for science, space, and technology, and, more specifically, PC gaming, began at 10 years old. It was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms.

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