Google Workspace outage, 18 August 2026
**Summary** Some customers may experience slowness while using Google Drive. **Description** We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2...
- Started
- Resolved
- 19 Aug 2026, 12:40 UTC (after 12 h 42 min)
- Impact
- Minor
- Affected
- Google Drive
Is this still happening?
No. Google Workspace marked this incident resolved on 19 Aug 2026, 12:40 UTC, 12 h 42 min after it began.
Right now: Google Workspace reports all systems operational. (as of 5 Nov, 00:11 UTC) Live Google Workspace status
What caused it: Google Workspace's root cause analysis
# Incident Report Summary On Tuesday, 18 August 2026 at 16:58 US/Pacific, an incident affecting Google Drive occurred for a duration of 12 hours and 42 minutes. Customers located in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced severe latency, sporadic loading failures, and errors when accessing Google Drive. To our valued Google Workspace customers, we are deeply sorry for the service interruption you experienced. We are taking immediate and decisive action to address the issue and strengthen our systems against future incidents. Other Google Workspace services were not affected. Root Cause Google utilizes a multi-tiered global load balancing and network routing architecture to serve traffic efficiently. To ensure fair use and prevent congestion, bandwidth allocation is managed by attributing traffic to specific downstream services. A misconfiguration in the attribution of traffic caused the bandwidth usage to be incorrectly attributed to the frontend network load balancing tier itself, rather than to the Drive service. The sequence of events leading to customer impact was as follows: * Traffic from the regional load balancing tier was incorrectly attributed to the load balancing infrastructure rather than the Drive service. * Unrelated traffic caused network bandwidth usage attributed to the load balancing infrastructure in this region to exceed its quota. * Network bandwidth management systems applied throttling to this traffic to enforce quotas, causing severe network congestion affecting Drive traffic in this region. * This congestion led to increased latency, slowness, and error rates for users accessing Drive in the affected regions. Remediation and Prevention Google engineers were alerted to the issue via automated monitoring and an influx of customer support cases, with initial incident response teams engaged by 17:21 US/Pacific on 18 August , 2026\. Engineers initially attempted to alleviate the congestion by draining regional frontend traffic to an alternate geographic location, but this proved ineffective and was reverted. The team then mitigated the issue by migrating regional traffic to an upgraded internal network routing architecture, which correctly set the traffic attribution for Drive. Normal operations were fully restored at 05:40 once 100% of the regional traffic was migrated to the upgraded network architecture. To prevent a recurrence of this issue, our engineering teams are undertaking the following structural preventative act...
Last update from Google Workspace
# Incident Report Summary On Tuesday, 18 August 2026 at 16:58 US/Pacific, an incident affecting Google Drive occurred for a duration of 12 hours and 42 minutes. Customers located in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced severe latency, sporadic loading failures, and errors when accessing Google Drive. To our valued Google Workspace customers, we are deeply sorry for the service interruption you experienced. We are taking immediate and decisive action to address the issue and strengthen our systems against future incidents. Other Google Workspace services were not affected. Root Cause Google utilizes a multi-tiered global load balancing and network routing architecture to serve t...
Read the full incident on the official Google Workspace status page
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