Over the past day or so, there have been numerous complaints about Google Analytics real time analytics having serious latency issues. Some are saying the charts will show little to know traffic and then all of a sudden spike to show a tremendous amount of traffic.
Personally, I have been trying to replicate this for the past 24-hours and have been unsuccessful. But maybe this is specific to some regions and not impacting me in New York?
The Google status dashboard has not shown any issues with Google Analytics in the past 24-hours. I do not see any response from an official Google representative on these complaints, not in the forums and not on social (but Google Analytics on social in 2022 has been super inactive because of staffing). But there are numerous complaints on Twitter and in the Google Analytics Forums (I am linking only to one). Here is what the forum says:
Is anyone else experiencing outages in realtime active users are dipping and spiking sporadically right now.
Yes! Hope this is an outage, because it has lasted longer than most and was starting to scare me that it was something else wrong with my site.
Same here, and the active user on site has a big difference with active users.
Here are some tweets on the topic:
I do not but people are complaining
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) April 6, 2022
Yes real time is broken for the last 8 hours
— stckstck (@stckstck404) April 6, 2022
Yeah I debated pinging you Barry. 1st I saw someone else report the real time analytics issue was this am, but it's been going on since 6pm pacific or so 4/5. Realtime is under reporting active users https://t.co/sXfrFo1NTw
— Daniel J. Pinna (@djpinna) April 7, 2022
If you have problems with real time data from Google Analytics (data is very inaccurate/much lower), please comment on this ticket: https://t.co/ulBhZXHqWy#GoogleAnalytics #Realtime @googleanalytics
— Ben Rüegg 🇺🇦 (@bytebln) April 6, 2022
Google doesn't have any solution on fixing real time, even for licensed client. Such glitch is always there.
— Munaz Anjum (@munazanjum) April 6, 2022
@dannysullivan @rustybrick It's been two days the problem comes in google analytics real time, hope the team is working on it #GoogleAnalytics
— Kamlesh Shukla (@iKamleshShukla) April 7, 2022
So I am not sure what is going on but there are a lot of folks having issues with Google Analytics real time reports both in GA4 and UA3.
Forum discussion at Google Analytics Forums.
Update: Google has finally confirmed the issue and said it was resolved. Google posted this message here:
We have become aware of a problem lasting between 2022-04-05 14:08:29 PDT and 2022-04-06 15:28:54 PDT where Universal Analytics is had an issue with its Realtime reporting interface. As a result, the interface may have shown incomplete results, or no data at all.This problem has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.
If you encountered an issue with Universal Analytics realtime reporting interface before or after this time period, please reach out to Analytics support to troubleshoot normally, it is not related to this incident.
Update April 11th: It is apparently not fixed and Google posted an update over here saying:
We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Analytics. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Analytics, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.GA4 reports may appear blank or fail to load.
A bit later Google is working on a fix:
Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by Apr 11, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. The affected users are able to access Google Analytics, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.Google Analytics 4 (GA4) reports may appear blank or fail to load. Mitigation efforts are underway.
And a bit more later, Google said for most people it is resolved:
Google Analytics service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. The affected users are able to access Google Analytics, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.In the vast majority of cases, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) reports now display as expected.
Full deployment of the mitigation for this problem is expected to be complete in the near future.
And Google now said it is resolved a little while later:
Mitigation measures have been deployed.
Another update: Check this out:
Google has added a warning for the real-time analytics reports in Universal Analytics. There are ongoing issues, which cause them to be unreliable.
— Charles Farina (@CharlesFarina) April 14, 2022
You'll need to use GA4 if you need real-time analytics: https://t.co/QjGugvxkxr pic.twitter.com/Oidwt786wk
Update April 21: Turns out Google is not going to fix this fully, see more details here.
