alt Hacker NewsI submitted this "fact" and it is indeed a true story, exactly as you said.
The "global protobuf db" had comments all over it saying it's not intended for production-critical tasks, and it had a lot of caveats and gotchas even aside from being built by Jeff's desktop, but it was so convenient that people naturally ended up using it anyway.
There was a variant of this that occurred later. By that time there might not have been a dependency on Jeff's workstation anymore, but the DB, or at least one of its replicas, was getting copied to... /gfs/cg/home/sanjay/ — I don't believe it was Jeff this time. At some point, there was a very long PCR in the Oregon datacenter, perhaps even the same one that happened a few weeks after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. With the CG cluster powered off for multiple days, a bunch of stuff broke, but in this case the issue might have been solved by dumping the data and/or reading it from elsewhere.