Google Analytics Bug Causes Lost Data For An Hour On October 18th

Google Analytics had a bug that resulted in about an hour of lost data on October 18th. That data is unrecoverable and you should note, maybe with an annotation, that there was a glitch resulting in less data being collected by Google Analytics.

Many of us saw the issue when looking at the real time Google Analytics dashboard on October 18th, I even tweeted about it:

Yes – @googleanalytics real time reports seem to be struggling right now – I am sure the team is working on it

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 18, 2021

Daniel J. Pinna noticed the data seemed to have not been backfilled so he followed up with Google who told him that the data is lost between 7:27am and 8:30am PDT on October 18, 2021.

Here is what Google told him:

To help you further, I’ve immediately checked with our team and confirmed that there was an account outage issue from 7:27am and 8:30am PDT on October 18, 2021. Any data sent to Google Analytics from 7:27am and 8:30am PDT on October 18, 2021 was not collected and is therefore not present in Analytics reporting. Because this happened at the collection level, data cannot be restored via reprocessing or any other method.

In addition to the impact this has on customers’ Analytics reporting it affects downstream integrations (e.g. Google Optimize), notably affecting advertiser-oriented features such as conversion-export and audience evaluation.. Multiple Google Ads accounts with Automatic payment methods have been impacted due to this intermittent technical issue.
Multiple Google Analytics accounts have been impacted due to this intermittent technical issue.

However, I’m delighted to inform you that the issue has been resolved and your reporting is now up and running. There is no further action required from you.

Our team would like to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the temporary outage. Also, I highly appreciate your time and patience while our team worked on this issue.

Additional Information:

Any data uploaded during that period is lost forever and cannot be recovered with reprocessing since it was dropped by Collection.

The problem with Google Analytics has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.

Collection of all Google Analytics data was interrupted during this incident and is unavailable. Affects on reporting and linked products are under assessment.

I hope this email helps you in resolving the query. In the meantime, if you have further questions feel free to contact us or reply to this email thread and we will be happy to assist you.

Well here’s our answer.
Data sent to Google Analytics from 7:27am and 8:30am PDT on October 18, 2021 was not collected and is therefore not present in Analytics reporting. Because this happened at the collection level, data cannot be restored via reprocessing or any other method. pic.twitter.com/bGPKdA8Ep1

— Daniel J. Pinna (@djpinna) October 19, 2021

He also posted this information at WebmasterWorld.

So if you see a weird data void glitch in your Google Analytics reporting on October 18th – that is why.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Twitter.