RESOLVED: **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 wh

Timeline

1. 24 Aug · 16:31 UTC 🟠 Resolved atom

   Incident began at 2026-08-18 23:58 and ended at 2026-08-19 12:40 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
   
   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

2. 24 Aug · 16:31 UTC 🟠 Resolved atom

   Incident began at 2026-08-18 23:58 and ended at 2026-08-19 12:40 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
   
   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

3. 20 Aug · 20:00 UTC 🟠 Resolved atom

   Incident began at 2026-08-18 23:58 and ended at 2026-08-19 12:40 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
   
   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

4. 20 Aug · 20:00 UTC 🟠 Resolved atom

   Incident began at 2026-08-18 23:58 and ended at 2026-08-19 12:40 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
   
   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

5. 20 Aug · 20:00 UTC 🟠 Resolved atom

   Incident began at 2026-08-18 23:58 and ended at 2026-08-19 12:40 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
   
   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