On September 5, some posts scheduled for Google Business Profile failed or were delayed.

A request to Google’s YouTube notification service became unusually slow. That work ran in the same processing system used to refresh Google Business Profile connections, causing the system to fall behind. Some Google Business Profile credentials expired before they could be refreshed, which caused scheduled posts to fail.

We identified failed scheduled posts across at least 49 connected Google Business Profiles. Once service recovered, customers could retry failed posts from their queues.

We increased processing capacity, refreshed affected Google Business Profile connections, limited how long the slow external request could hold up other work, and cleared duplicate queued tasks. We monitored publishing until it returned to normal.

This incident exposed a weakness in how work for different social networks shared the same processing system. We are separating this processing by social network so that a problem affecting one is less likely to affect another.

We have also improved time limits, retry behavior, and error logging so similar problems can be contained and diagnosed more quickly.

We’re sorry for the disruption this caused.