Background 

On November 23rd, 2021, Google officially deprecated the legacy “Contacts API”. This API has been utilized since the beginning by Spanning to meet your organization’s data protection needs for contacts. The Contacts API has been replaced by the new “People API” 

Spanning proactively planned, engineered, and deployed new code to prepare for this migration in advance. Upon switching to this new API, we realized that it was not delivering the same performance as we used to achieve with the Contacts API. We believe in ensuring our standards are met and consistent. The engineering team has conducted a full investigation into why this performance degradation has occurred and has identified additional improvements post-migration to bring the performance of our contacts back up to our high standards. 

What is the impact? 

• After November 23rd, 2021, customers may notice that contacts backups may be taking an unusually long amount of time to complete 
• Customers may notice an unusually large number of contacts backup attempts returning 99999 errors “Too many requests” 

What is not impacted? 

• There is no impact to contacts backed up before November 23rd, 2021, by the legacy Contacts API or any contacts successfully backed up by the People API after November 23rd, 2021, 
• There is no impact on the data at rest of any other workload (Drive, Mail, Calendar, etc.) 
• There is no impact on the ability to perform a contacts restore with the new People API 

What have we done so far? 

In addition to following best practices and standards like incremental back-off logic, we have worked with our ISV support partners to raise our app’s API capacity to meet the rigorous needs of our customers. In addition to the output of those improvements we have implemented: 

• More efficient querying and processing of contacts data via the API 
• Additional improvements to our logic to further reduce the number of 99999 errors from the API 

What are Spanning’s next steps and when can we expect a resolution? 

We believe customers should already begin seeing improvements in performance. Spanning is working on a solution to utilize delta queries for Google Workspace People API to retrieve only changed contacts.