Google Workspace Status : Gmail - AVAILABLE - 2026-02-09 05:04:23 UTC

[back...@gmail.com]

Product: Gmail
Status: AVAILABLE
Published: 2026-02-09 05:04:23 UTC

# Preliminary Incident Report
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. 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: 24 January 2026 05:02
Incident End: 24 January 2026 09:55
Duration: 4 hours and 53 minutes
## Summary
On Saturday, 24 January 2026, Gmail experienced elevated email
delivery time and reduction in the number of emails that were checked
for spam for a duration of 4 hours and 53 minutes. Affected users saw
email delivery delays and a banner indicating their messages were not
scanned for spam on some email. We understand how important Gmail's
reliability is for our users and sincerely apologize for the impact
this disruption may have caused to your organization. We are taking
immediate steps to improve our systems' performance and availability
to prevent recurrence.
## Preliminary Root Cause
This incident was caused by an overload of Gmail's spam checking
systems, which in turn was triggered by a temporary failure in a
backend service. This led to a cascading failure due to excessive
retries.
The sequence of events leading to customer impact was as follows:
- **Trigger:** The incident began when a backend component within
Gmail's mail processing pipeline, which is responsible for analyzing
incoming messages, demonstrated increased latency.
- **Cause:** While the initial error was temporary, the system's
response to it caused the impact. A retry mechanism, designed to
handle such transient failures, generated a massive and sustained
volume of retry traffic. This cascading retry storm overwhelmed the
capacity of multiple backend systems for several hours.
- **Effect:** The overload on the spam checking services and related
systems meant that there were mail delivery delays and not all
incoming mail was fully classified. To protect users from potentially
malicious content, Gmail displayed a warning banner on the affected
emails. This issue resulted in a subset of Gmail users experiencing
message delivery delays, which were generally 10 minutes or less.
Google engineers are performing a full root cause analysis and will
provide additional information once it is available.
## Remediation
Google engineers were alerted to the issue via automated monitoring at
05:12 US/Pacific on Saturday, 24 January 2026, and immediately began
an investigation. The investigation identified high error rates and
latency across the classification pipeline.
To mitigate the impact of the incident, Google engineers implemented
several measures focused on increasing system capacity and temporarily
reducing load.
The key mitigation actions taken were:
- **Increasing Capacity:** Google engineers increased resources for
the affected services. This included general capacity increases for
the spam classification services and related backend components. One
specific action was a significant, emergency increase of resources for
a backend service responsible for abuse detection.
- **Reducing System Load:** To alleviate pressure on the systems,
Google engineers temporarily disabled certain non essential
functionality to increase headroom for the spam classification
services. Google engineers also deployed an emergency configuration to
the spam classification services that disabled a specific message
analysis feature, which was expected to lower the error rate.
- **Tuning Retry Logic:** To address the cascading issues caused by
excessive retries, the team rolled out changes to the retry logic in
the mail delivery system. This tuning involved reducing the number of
retries and implementing emergency rate limiting for retries, applied
at the top of the stack. This approach helped to quickly shed load,
allowing backend services to recover.
## Description of Impact
On Saturday, 24 January 2026 from 05:02 to 09:55 US/Pacific, many
Gmail messages experienced elevated failure rates in spam checking.
Affected users saw a banner indicating their messages were not scanned
for spam and experienced delivery delays, generally 10 minutes or
less.
**User Experience:**
- **Warning Banners:** Users received a banner on incoming messages
stating: "Be careful with this message. Gmail hasn't scanned this
message for spam, unverified senders, or harmful software."
- **Delivery Delays:** Impacted messages experienced delivery delays,
majorly between 5 to 10 minutes. However, there were no instances of
lost emails or erroneously delivered during this period.
- Some users may have noticed that promotional or social labels were
not correctly applied during the disruption.

Link to official detail of this status:
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY9CJ36annsfytjQ