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 actions:
- Resilient Network Protocol Migration: We are expediting the complete migration of all regional frontend traffic to the newer, resilient network routing protocol to ensure accurate bandwidth attribution under all congestion scenarios.
- Delegation Root Cause Remediation: We are addressing the underlying mechanism that caused the incorrect delegation and analyzing similar cases across the fleet to ensure it does not reoccur.
Detailed Description of Impact
From 18 August 2026, 16:58 to 19 August 2026, 05:40 US/Pacific for a duration of 12 hours, 42 minutes, Google Drive users in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced severe performance degradation, including high latency and errors accessing Drive or listing files via Editors. Service was fully restored as of 19 August, 05:40 US/Pacific.
Google Drive:
- Elevated Latency: Users experienced extreme slowness when loading the Drive interface or accessing files, with initial data retrieval times heavily delayed.
- Loading Failures and Errors: Many user requests timed out or returned HTTP 502 errors due to the aggressive network throttling dropping the connections.
Scope Exclusion:
- Customers accessing Google Drive from outside the Australia, Philippines and New Zealand regions were largely unaffected by this localized throttling event.
- Other Google Workspace applications not reliant on this specific routing path remained stable during the incident window.
Preliminary Incident Report
We sincerely apologize for the disruption this incident caused to your business. We know how much you rely on Google Workspace, and we regret the impact on your productivity. We are working to address the root cause and prevent this from occurring in the future.
Please note, this information is based on our best knowledge at the time of posting and is subject to change as our investigation continues. A final Incident Report with preventative actions will be posted once our investigation is complete.
If you have experienced impact outside of what is listed below, please reach out to Google Workspace Support using the help article https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213.
Date/Time of the Issue (All time US/Pacific)
Incident Start: 18 August 2026 16:58
Incident End: 19 August 2026 05:40
Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes
Summary
On August 18, 2026 from 16:58 to August 19, 2026 05:40 US/Pacific, Drive customers in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced degraded performance and slowness. During this period users also experienced 502 errors. Other Google Workspace services were not affected.
Preliminary 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
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 August 18, 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 once 100% of the regional traffic was migrated to the upgraded network architecture.
Description of Impact
Between August 18, 2026, at 16:58 US/Pacific and August 19, 2026, at 05:40 US/Pacific, Google Drive users in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced severe latency, degraded performance and 502 errors.
During this roughly 12-hour and 42-minute window, affected customers may have observed significant slowness or errors when attempting to access Google Drive or listing files through Editors (e.g. docs.google.com), with initial load times significantly delayed. The issue was fully mitigated as of August 19, 2026, at 05:40 US/Pacific, and normal service has been restored.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may have experienced slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
The issue with Google Drive has been resolved for all affected customers as of Wednesday, 2026-08-19 05:40 PDT.
Our engineering teams determined the slowness was the result of a localized capacity and routing issue within our regional infrastructure.
To restore service, we implemented a fix to alleviate the network congestion and accelerated a planned infrastructure upgrade in the affected region to ensure normal performance levels.
We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may have experienced slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
The issue is now mitigated
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 06:00 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 04:30 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 03:00 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team has identified the root cause of the issue and is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 02:00 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while accessing Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team has identified the root cause of the issue and is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 01:30 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Multiple customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while using Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause.
We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 00:30 PDT with current details.
Symptoms
Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or errors while using Google Drive. Some customers also may observe 502 errors with Drive inaccessible for a brief period.
Workaround
None at this time.
Summary
Some customers may experience slowness while using Google Drive.
Description
We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT.
Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause.
We will provide an update by Tuesday, 2026-08-18 22:00 PDT with current details.
We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.
Symptoms
Affected customers may experience slowness while using Google Drive.
Workaround
None at this time.