We on the Google Groups team released a new version of the Google
Groups service on January 22nd.  Many of you identified a bug in the
software, which we fixed and released later that day. The bug was live
only during that time, which was slightly less than 24 hours (from
about 1am to 10pm PST).

You would have been affected by this bug if the following conditions
hold:
 (a) you have multiple email addresses associated with your account
 (b) you attempted to log in while the bug was live
 (c) you subscribe to or own groups under the different emails in (a)

The bug made it *appear* that you had somehow lost a bunch of group
memberships, including memberships to groups that you own.  In fact,
your subscriptions were fine, but you had no way of knowing this. Most
of you who use Google Groups would not have been affected at all. Most
of you
who were affected are not affected any longer. When the bug was fixed,
everything went back to normal. Almost.

There were a few hundred adventurous souls who worked around the bug.
In some cases, those workarounds resulted in the removal of the
owner's memberships when we restored access, which is the issue that
about 30 people have reported here.

We believe that we have identified all of the users who lost owner or
manager rights as an indirect result of our error, and we have fixed
those cases as best we could. In some cases, we don't have enough
evidence to say that you should be an owner, and in those cases we've
made you a manager; you can ask another group owner to promote you or
follow up in the help forum. In either case, if you do not like the
email
address or the nickname that we used to resubscribe you to your group,
you can change it by clicking on the "Edit my subscription" link in
the group, and modifying as appropriate -- there's a little menu for
email, and a field for nickname.

We are truly sorry for this error and have added additional checks to
prevent it from happening again.  We thank you for your patience and
trust as we checked and double-checked the fix. Please raise any
concerns in this forum.
 -- The Google Groups Team