{"UUID":"b20ad40a-51c0-494c-89bc-e01290d46b5f","URL":"https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/k71P8nHp32hgcMSsC3mR","ArchiveURL":"","Title":"Google Meet Livestream degraded quality","StartTime":"2021-10-25T11:00:00Z","EndTime":"2021-10-26T17:00:00Z","Categories":["config-change","time"],"Keywords":["google meet","livestream","buffering","latency","video","backend","workload","configuration"],"Company":"Google","Product":"Google Meet Livestream","SourcePublishedAt":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","SourceFetchedAt":"2026-05-04T17:52:16.993725Z","Summary":"The Google Meet Livestream feature experienced disruptions that caused intermittent degraded quality of experience for a small subset of viewers, starting 25 October 2021 0400 PT and ending 26 October 2021 1000 PT. Quality was degraded for a total duration of 4 hours (3 hours on 25 October and 1 hour on 26 October). During this time, no more than 15% of livestream viewers experienced higher rebuffer rates and latency in livestream video playback. We sincerely apologize for the disruption that may have affected your business-critical events. We have identified the cause of the issue and have taken steps to improve our service.","Description":"On October 25, 2021, starting at 11:00 UTC, the Google Meet Livestream feature experienced disruptions. These issues led to intermittent degraded quality of experience for a subset of viewers, including higher rebuffer rates and latency in video playback. The problem was resolved by October 26, 2021, at 17:00 UTC, with quality degraded for a total of 4 hours during this period.\n\nUp to 15% of livestream viewers were affected, experiencing higher rebuffer rates and latency. Specifically, viewers with ongoing livestream events encountered rebuffering issues, with affected livestreams experiencing greater than 5% rebuffering of total viewing time.\n\nThe incident was traced to an unexpected surge in workload on the backend message delivery mechanism for Google Meet livestreams. This surge caused the system to hit a configuration threshold, leading to the degraded performance.\n\nGoogle engineers mitigated the impact by reconfiguring the resources required for processing data and system messages, aiming for higher quality livestream playbacks.\n\nIdentified improvements include increasing resource allocation for the backend message delivery system in the short term and implementing automatic detection of message delivery overload in the long term. Enhancements to monitoring systems to capture real-time data on livestream quality and updates to alert logic were also planned to proactively address spikes in rebuffering rates."}