I want a "24" style realtime movie of this event. Call it "Outage" and follow engineers across the globe struggling to bring back critical infrastructure.
What?! It's the most exciting part of the job. Entire departments coming together, working as a team to problem solve under duress. What's more exciting than that?
I have done similar things several times and I think it would be boring.
It's Sunday so I guess they are not together. Instead there could be a lot of calls and working on some collaboration platforms. Everyone just staring at the screen, searching, reporting, testing and trying to shrink the problem scope.
If there's a record on everyone there must be a narrator explaining what's going on or audiences would definitely be confused.
It's Google so they have solid logging, analyzing and discovery means. Bad things do happen but they have the power to deal with them.
I suppose less technical firms(Equifax maybe?) encounter similar kind of crysis would be more fun to look at. Everything is a mess because they didn't build enough things to deal with them. And probably non-technical manager demanding precise response, or someone is blaming someone etc.
Having done it at both big companies and startups... honestly, the startup version is more interesting. Higher stakes, more resourcefulness required, more swearing, and more camaraderie. The incidents I've been a part of in big company contexts have been pretty undramatic - tons of focus on keeping emotions muted, carefully unpeeling the onion, and then carefully sequencing mitigations and repairs.
No, not at Google. Lore has it in our office that it used to be hacked high speed segways. At least until somebody decided to build a ramp to jump with and the fiery chariot was reduced to rubble. The driver lived.
