Google Workspace Status Dashboard

Summary

On Tuesday, 22 March 2022, Google Cloud Networking experienced congestion on network infrastructure to and from the network edge locations [1] in Queretaro, Mexico, for a duration of 1 hour and 45 minutes, following multiple fiber cuts between the United States and Mexico. Affected customers may have experienced high latency, high retransmits and elevated errors.

We would like to apologize for the length and severity of this incident. We are taking immediate steps to prevent a recurrence and improve reliability in the future.

[1] - https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/edge-locations

Root Cause

Google’s wide-area network is primarily comprised of infrastructure owned and operated by Google, although some physical links use fiber infrastructure which is owned and operated by third parties. Google has multiple resilient fiber paths and network points of presence serving users in Mexico.

Multiple simultaneous fiber cuts on diversely-routed paths, at the same time as a planned maintenance event on another diversely-routed path, resulted in a capacity shortfall in Google’s wide-area network between Queretaro, Mexico and the United States. This multiple failure event represents a rare case in which the resulting capacity shortfall was visible to Google's users.

Traffic was subsequently redirected to alternate links; however, there was insufficient capacity to serve all the redirected traffic, resulting in packet loss for user-facing network traffic to Google from users in Mexico.

Remediation and Prevention

Google’s automated repair mechanism detected the congestion on Tuesday, 22 March 2022, at 15:42 US/Pacific and redirected the traffic through alternate edge locations. However, the alternate link did not have sufficient capacity to serve all the redirected traffic, resulting in packet loss. The congestion was cleared when traffic was manually routed around the failed links on Tuesday, 22 March 2022, at 17:15 US/Pacific.

Google is committed to quickly and continually improving our technology and operations to prevent service disruptions. However, this incident was the result of multiple concurrent failures on links which are designed to provide resilience; such failures, whilst very rare, are expected at a low frequency. We are taking the following steps to ensure we respond quickly to similar events in the future:

• Improving the reliability of tooling that manually reroutes traffic in extreme multiple-failure scenarios.
• Improving the diagnostic systems that help Google's Cloud Networking teams decide how to deal with extreme multiple-failure scenarios.

We appreciate your patience and apologize again for the impact to your organization. We thank you for your business.

Detailed Description of Impact

On Tuesday, 22 March 2022 from 15:30 to 17:15 US/Pacific, customers reaching Google services from Mexico may have experienced network slowness and packet loss, and errors returned from our services. This may have resulted in customers not being able to access services running on Google Cloud and Workspace services including:

• Google Meet
• Gmail
• Google Drive

We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption may have caused. We would like to provide some information about this incident below. Please note, this information is based on our best knowledge at the time of posting and is subject to change as our investigation continues. If you have experienced impact outside of what is listed below, please reach out to Google Support by opening a case using help article https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213.

(All Times US/Pacific)

Incident Start: 22 March 2022 15:30

Incident End: 22 March 2022 17:15

Duration: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Affected Services and Features:

Google Cloud Networking - Cloud VPN, Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Load Balancers Workspace Products - Gmail, Meet, Drive and other Workspace products

Regions/Zones: Mexico

Description:

Google Cloud Networking experienced congestion on network infrastructure to and from the network edge locations in Queretaro, Mexico, for a duration of 1 hour and 45 minutes, following a fiber cut between the United States & Mexico.

Google’s automated repair mechanism detected the congestion and redirected the traffic through alternate edge locations. However, the alternate link did not have sufficient capacity to serve all the redirected traffic, resulting in packet loss for user-facing network traffic to Google. When traffic was manually routed to take other paths, the congestion was cleared.

Customer Impact:

Customers reaching Google services, including GCP and Workspace, from Mexico may have experienced high latency, high packet loss, high retransmits, and errors returned from our services, resulting in customers not being able to access those services.

The issue with Gmail and other Workspace products has been resolved for all affected users as of Tuesday, 2022-03-22 17:15 US/Pacific.

We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue.

Customers in Mexico and Central America may have been unable to access Gmail and other Workspace products from Tuesday, 2022-03-22 16:15 US/Pacific to Tuesday, 2022-03-22 17:15 US/Pacific.

Our Engineers confirmed that the access to Gmail and Workspace products is now working but customers may experience higher than normal latency accessing the services.

We will provide an update by Tuesday, 2022-03-22 18:50 US/Pacific with current details.

We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.