Whaah..
I'm going to export them asap. That would be a disaster if they were wiped out. Infact, a good part of my life would be wiped down if my gmail account was deleted.

I would suggest that Google creates a service to burn down and ship CDs with your data. They would be encrypted to avoid interception during shipping and would cost a few bucks.
Even better, they would be CD-RW or DVD-RW (better as Gmail is way bigger than a CD-R) and they would be an utility to sync it with your mail account (download the diff and burn it)

No, my contact list is still there....

I am going to use the "export" function in Gmail contacts to back up my list to Yahoo Address Book.....I've been meaning to do this for ages but never got round to it. I'll do it today.

Mine are still there but I guess I'll be doing some exporting right about now.

Mine are still there, but I'm following pierre's wise lead and exporting...

Mine is there too, no problems at the moment. But just in case... It would be usefull to do a backup...

Mine are still there, but I'm following Pierre's wise lead and exporting them right now ...

Seconding (or seventh-ing) the all okay signal out here. Commencing operation back up.

Mine are still there too. Will bach them up ASAP.

BTW: I noticed a 5min outage of Gmail this morning at around 9am CET. Anyone else?

Done backing up. I do them regulary, so the lost wouldnt be that bad... but still anoying

Mine are still there but I will, as others here have said, back mine up...

In GMail they seem to be there and working, but my complete Google Talk contacts are away ...

Mine are still there. I believe that Gmail is very stable, but proactive caution can never hurt. Just periodically export your contacts to a safe place. Then, if you have an "always on" Internet connection at home, consider enabling POP in Gmail, and then set up a simple email client like Thunderbird to auto-download new messages once or twice per day (realistically, you don't need it more frequent than that.) This will at least save everything you have *received* (not sure about "sent" items.)

It happened to me before.... The Contacts were there but suddenly Google Talk removed all my friends from the list. After some research found out that for some reason Google moved all my friends in contacts to "block" list. No idea why. So had to move them back to "auto" again.

Update: Some users of the original Groups thread report that their lost contacts have come back.

[Via http://searchengineland.com/070131-092727.php]

Phew. Mine are back after disappearing for the evening, and my accounts came back recently too. I always sort of thought of software-as-a-service reducing (eliminating?) the need to do backups of things like address books... now I'm not quite as sure, even after having my contacts restored.

Sounds like things are back to normal, but I'll still ask a Gmail person if they have any details that they can fill in.

My contacts are a bit different from before. All contacts that had 2+ emails are splitted. So, for instance, contact Foo that had foomail.com and foo2mail.com emails, generated 2 contacts Foo, each one with one email as his main. I'll be kinda busy for a long time reassuring that my contacts are properly configured :(

I have not tried Gmail since reading about these problems, but I can't even get into it right now. Apparently the site is down for me.

TonyB