Google Workspace Status : Gmail - AVAILABLE - 2026-04-17 09:10:35 UTC

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Product: Gmail
Status: AVAILABLE
Published: 2026-04-17 09:10:35 UTC

# Incident Report
## Summary
On Wednesday, 08 April 2026, Gmail customers may have experienced
delays/failures when sending or receiving emails. The impact lasted
for a duration of 8 hours, 10 minutes.
The issue primarily affected the delivery of messages to external
recipient domains, where impacted users observed delays or received
failure messages when sending emails.
To our customers whose communications were impacted during this
disruption, we sincerely apologize. This is not the level of quality
and reliability we strive to offer you, and we are taking immediate
steps to improve the platform's performance and availability.
## Root Cause
The root cause was identified as increased connection errors to
external mail services hosted by a specific 3rd party provider.
## Remediation and Prevention
The issue was detected by our engineering team through internal
alerts. Engineering teams immediately started an investigation and
took the following steps to contain the impact:
**External Mail Provider Reachout:** Google worked with the external
mail provider to unblock connections and prevent similar issues in the
future.
Teams monitored rejection rates until they returned to normal levels,
verifying that the system was healthy for over an hour to confirm
resolution.
Google is committed to improving its technology and operations to
prevent similar service disruptions.
Google is committed to preventing a repeat of this issue in the future
and is completing the following actions:
- Deploy systems to proactively track external blocklists and alert on
degradation before users are impacted.
- Improve monitoring and alerting systems to proactively detect errors
related to external email recipient communication.
## Detailed Description of Impact
On Wednesday, 8 April 2026, starting at approximately 06:30 PDT, Gmail
customers may have experienced delays/failures when sending or
receiving emails. The issue primarily affected the delivery of
messages to external recipient domains, with impacted users receiving
bounce messages. Specifically, some users observed error messages
stating, "The user you are trying to contact is receiving email at a
rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered".

Link to official detail of this status:
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/224ozRqzW4sFBDK8hLnT