Good afternoon!
I recently found that when I ping 8.8.8.8 from my home network that the ping times are 500+ ms. I did a little digging and here is what myself and few other local IT guys have found...
Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.8.8] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 3 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
3 6 ms 4 ms 4 ms 99.174.26.68
4 6 ms 5 ms 14 ms 99.131.205.144
5 9 ms 6 ms 10 ms 12.83.112.17
7 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms 12.247.147.22
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 432 ms 720 ms 717 ms dns.google [8.8.8.8]
Trace complete.
You can see here that the ping times are fine until it hits the last hop which is the 8.8.8.8 DNS server which results in a 432 ms, 720 ms, and 717 ms ping time.
Tracing route to dns.google [8.8.4.4] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
3 5 ms 6 ms 5 ms 99.174.26.68
4 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms 99.131.205.144
5 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms 12.83.112.17
7 13 ms 12 ms 11 ms 12.247.147.22
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 11 ms 13 ms 11 ms 108.170.225.110
10 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms 216.239.47.35
11 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms dns.google [8.8.4.4]
Trace complete.
You can see here that the ping times are acceptable and there are no issues.
Now what makes this more interesting is that a couple of other IT guys that I know in the area do the same tests. For at least one of them if they ping 8.8.8.8 ping times are normal however if they ping 8.8.4.4 they experience very high ping times. I also had them do a trace route to each DNS server and we found is that when they ping 8.8.8.8 it essentially takes the same path that it does when I ping 8.8.4.4. When they do a trace route to 8.8.4.4 the traffic appears to take the same path that it deos when I ping 8.8.8.8. This would appear to indicate that there is some type of routing or load balancer issue occuring with the Google DNS servers.
Additional Information:
Data and Time Of Issue - Now, 8/21/2019 (has been like this for at least three days)
Location - Murfreesboro TN
Platform - Windows 10 PC and PFSense Firewall (testing was done from both, both had the same results)
I can do additional testing if needed and if a Google Employee would like my WAN IP address I can provide it.
Thank You!