alt Hacker NewsIt's not inevitable, it's essentially impossible.
There are a few things that can cause tremendously widespread outages, essentially all of them network configuration changes. Actually deleting customer data is dramatically more difficult to the point of impossible - there are so many different services in so many different locations with so many layers of access control. There is no "one command" that can do such a thing - at the scale of a worldwide network of data centers there is no "rm -rf /".
Replies
Google accidentally deleted customer location history data from customer devices (after intentionally deleting it from Google servers) just last year.
If didn't back it up yourself, it is gone forever.
Ah, but you fail to account for Google's incredible knack for building tools designed to do things at scale. Or put AI in things that don't need it.
The possibility Google will either manage to unleash a malicious AI on their infrastructure and/or develop a way to destroy a lot of data at scale quite efficiently or some combination of the two is far from zero.
Bear in mind, this "Little Oops" should also have been impossible: https://www.techspot.com/news/103207-google-reveals-how-blan...
Delete a decryption key. Good luck! I'll see you at the end of time.
Break your control plane, and you can't stop the propagation of poison.
Propagate the wrong trust bundle... everywhere.
Also, it's not about the delete command. It's about the automatic cleanup following behind it that shreds everything, or repurposes the storage.