diff --git a/metadata-ingestion/setup.py b/metadata-ingestion/setup.py
index 519f9e3217b0cf..bab816eb553dfb 100644
--- a/metadata-ingestion/setup.py
+++ b/metadata-ingestion/setup.py
@@ -112,6 +112,8 @@ def get_long_description():
     "google-cloud-logging",
     "google-cloud-bigquery",
     "more-itertools>=8.12.0",
+    # we do not use protobuf directly but newer version caused bigquery connector to fail
+    "protobuf<=3.20.1",
 }
 
 snowflake_common = {