We experienced intermittent latency with Google Drive

Update timeline

1. resolved Sep 16, 2026, 04:36 PM UTC

   Description: The issue with Google Drive has been resolved for all affected customers as of Wednesday, 2026-09-16 07:41 PDT. We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue. Customer Symptoms: Users may have been unable to access Google Drive, experienced intermittent latency, or were unexpectedly prompted with CAPTCHAs when attempting to use the service. Workaround: Users were advised to retry actions.

2. resolved Sep 16, 2026, 08:14 PM 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 an 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: 16 September 2026 07:03 - Incident End: 16 September 2026 07:51 - Duration: 0 hours, 47 minutes Summary On Wednesday, 16 September 2026, Google Workspace (specifically Google Drive) experienced an issue where a subset of traffic was dropped for a duration of 48 minutes. Preliminary Root Cause This incident was triggered by a planned capacity test, which temporarily reduced Google Drive's serving capacity. The sequence of events leading to the impact was as follows: Engineers initiated a routine capacity test, causing Drive to operate with reduced capacity. The remaining available capacity was insufficient to handle peak user traffic. As traffic exceeded capacity, the capacity protection system was triggered and began blocking legitimate Drive requests. Remediation The issue was detected on Wednesday 16 September 2026 at 7:03 via automated outage detectors monitoring error rates and user queries. To mitigate the symptoms, Google engineers initiated an immediate rollback of the capacity test to restore serving capacity. Additionally, engineers performed manual upsizing operations to provide more capacity headroom. Google is committed to preventing a repeat of this issue in the future and is completing the following immediate actions: Resilience and Resourcing: Ensure sufficient buffer capacity is available globally during capacity tests. Address the Root Cause: Engineering will conduct a comprehensive review of capacity modeling and capacity protection thresholds to ensure they correctly account for capacity tests during peak traffic periods. Description of Impact On Wednesday, 16 September 2026, from 07:03 to 07:51 US/Pacific, Drive customers were unable to access Drive. A subset of overall traffic to Google Drive was dropped during this window. Affected users would have experienced failures, elevated latency, or timeouts when attempting to access, upload, or sync files in Google Drive. Additional Information for Customers: Customers who experienced impact during this window are encouraged to review their deployment logs. If you continue to see lingering issues after the incident window, please file a support ticket via the Google Workspace support portal.