**Title:** Customers may experience delays in receiving and sending emails. **Description:** We are aware of an issue with Gmail users experiencing delays in re...

What caused it: Gmail's root cause analysis

# Incident Report Summary On Wednesday, 08 April 2026, Gmail customers may have experienced delays/failures when sending or receiving emails. The impact lasted for a duration of 8 hours, 10 minutes. The issue primarily affected the delivery of messages to external recipient domains, where impacted users observed delays or received failure messages when sending emails. To our customers whose communications were impacted during this disruption, we sincerely apologize. This is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to offer you, and we are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability. Root Cause The root cause was identified as increased connection errors to external mail services hosted by a specific 3rd party provider. Remediation and Prevention The issue was detected by our engineering team through internal alerts. Engineering teams immediately started an investigation and took the following steps to contain the impact: External Mail Provider Reachout: Google worked with the external mail provider to unblock connections and prevent similar issues in the future. Teams monitored rejection rates until they returned to normal levels, verifying that the system was healthy for over an hour to confirm resolution. Google is committed to improving its technology and operations to prevent similar service disruptions. Google is committed to preventing a repeat of this issue in the future and is completing the following actions: - Deploy systems to proactively track external blocklists and alert on degradation before users are impacted. - Improve monitoring and alerting systems to proactively detect errors related to external email recipient communication. Detailed Description of Impact On Wednesday, 8 April 2026, starting at approximately 06:30 PDT, Gmail customers may have experienced delays/failures when sending or receiving emails. The issue primarily affected the delivery of messages to external recipient domains, with impacted users receiving bounce messages. Specifically, some users observed error messages stating, "The user you are trying to contact is receiving email at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered".

Read the full postmortem from Gmail