Incident Report

Summary

On 8 September 2025, beginning at 00:50 US/Pacific, Google Meet experienced intermittent issues loading meet.google.com for a total duration of 7 hours 46 minutes.

• Limited impact in Central Europe occurred between 00:50 - 7:05 US/Pacific.
• Widespread global impact, with many customers unable to load meet.google.com occurred between 10:25 -11:17 US/Pacific.

To our Google Meet customers whose business was 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 initial incident was caused by an overloaded cache service fleet that is part of Google’s Static Content Service (SCS). SCS is used to serve aspects of the Google Meet UI that are not tied to specific to individual users or meetings. If it fails to respond, users will typically be unable to load the Google Meet landing page.

The exact reason for the system overload is still being investigated. However, evidence points to a specific set of Meet hot keys bypassed internal caching layers starting on Sep 8, 2025 12:00 AM US/Pacific (9:00 AM Central European Time). This issue affected a limited number of cache servers, leading to their overload, and consequently, an increase in error rates for Google Meet users.

The global impact was caused by a configuration change that was attempting to permanently remedy the first issue by configuring a dedicated cache for Google Meet. This dedicated cache was inadequately sized and not pre-warmed. Subsequent traffic spikes resulted in cache misses, which overloaded the cache servers and triggered the global outage.

Remediation and Prevention

Google Meet engineers were alerted to the initial outage on 8 September 2025 at 03:12 US/Pacific via an alert indicating increased search activity about Google Meet outages. They immediately began an investigation which identified the overloaded cache service. By 07:05 US/Pacific, engineers had redirected traffic, mitigating the issue for users in Central Europe.

At 10:25 US/Pacific, Google engineers rolled out the configuration change to configure a dedicated cache for Google Meet as a permanent fix for the cache overload issue.

At 10:38 US/Pacific, Google engineers were alerted to increased error rates for the cache service fleet, and reopened the investigation. Once the global nature of the impact was identified, engineers began rolling back the configuration change at 10:56 US/Pacific.

The rollback of the configuration change completed at 11:09 US/Pacific and impact was confirmed to be mitigated by 11:17 US/Pacific.

Google is committed preventing a repeat of this issue in the future and is completing the following actions:

• Implement early detection monitoring and alerting mechanism for proactive future identification.

• Target: Q3 2025

• Implement configuration rollout safety improvements to proactively identify load nuances.

• Target: Q4 2025

• Validate Static Content Service (SCS) resilience to overload triggers to avoid a recurrence.

• Target: Q4 2025

Detailed Description of Impact

On Monday 8 September 2025, Meet users may have experienced issues when attempting to launch or join meetings for a total duration of 7 hours and 57 minutes.

• Impact Timeframe 1: 00:00 - 07:05 US/Pacific (Impact limited to Central Europe)
• Impact Timeframe 2: 10:25 - 11:17 US/Pacific (Global Impact)

When a user navigates to meet.google.com and attempts to join a meeting, multiple requests are being made from the user’s browser to SCS. Depending on which request failed, the user will experience different symptoms. Typical symptoms include blank pages and missing controls. Some customers were likely able to successfully reload a page that was broken on the initial load.

Users from a total of 1.8 million individual IP addresses were served at least one error when making an SCS request.

Mini Incident Report

We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption/outage 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 Cloud Support using https://cloud.google.com/support or to Google Workspace Support using help article https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213.

(All Times US/Pacific)

Incident Start: 8 September 2025 03:12

Incident End: 8 September 2025 11:18

Duration: 8 hours, 6 minutes

Affected Services and Features: Google Meet

Regions/Zones: Global

Description:

Impacted users may have experienced intermittent issues loading meet.google.com for a duration of 8 hours 6 minutes.

This incident was caused by errors in the system responsible for signing static content, such as Javascript and CSS files. The issue initially impacted users in Germany and possibly in the United Kingdom and Ireland, before spreading globally to all regions.

The trigger was identified as a recent code change. Google engineers redirected traffic away from the affected systems to mitigate the European impact. The subsequent global impact was addressed by rolling back the change, which fully mitigated the issue.

Google will complete and share a full Incident Report in the following days that will provide a full root cause analysis.

Customer Impact:

Users may have experienced intermittent issues loading meet.google.com.

The issue with Google Meet began at 10:25 PDT on 2025-09-08 and has been resolved for all affected users as of 2025-09-08 11:18 PDT.

From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue is a recent change in content edge cache. Our engineers have resolved the issue by rolling back the change.

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

Summary:

Resolved issues with Google Meet customers experiencing issues with loading the meet UI

Description:

Our engineers have identified the root cause and rolled back a recent change.

Current internal telemetry data indicates that the Google Meet service is operating normally as of 11:18 PDT. Our engineers are continuing to monitor the service stability closely.

We will provide more information by Monday, 2025-09-08 11:55 PDT.

Symptoms:

Affected customers experienced slow UI loads and as a result are unable to join meet sessions.

Workaround:

None at this time.

Summary:

Some Google Meet customers are experiencing issues with loading the meet UI

Description:

We are experiencing an issue with Google Meet beginning at Monday, 2025-09-08 10:25 PDT.

Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.

We will provide an update by Monday, 2025-09-08 11:30 PDT with current details.

Symptoms:

Affected customers are experiencing slow UI loads and as a result are unable to join meet sessions

Workaround:

None at this time.

Summary:

We are investigating reports of Google Meet service issues.

Description:

We are investigating reports of Google Meet degradation

We will provide more information by Monday, 2025-09-08 11:15 PDT.

Symptoms:

Customers may be experiencing elevated errors when joining meet sessions.

Workaround:

None at this time.