I'd be both saddened and wryly amused if it was #3. I can just imagine the day: first the 500 server errors whenever you went to do a Google Search, then the frantic denials that there is a problem, the poor SREs that would be working overtime without any idea how to bring the system back, the pushes toward other projects, the Wall Street damage control, followed by the stock market crash as people realized it wasn't coming back. Imagine how much your habits would have to change if you couldn't access Google: a lot of people get to all their favorite websites through navigational searches.
It'd have to be a major black swan, though, because there are many layers of canaries and metrics checks and rollbacks and backups in place. I think the issue now is that an increasing number of Googlers don't realize why these are important, but Search was built for robustness.
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I'd be both saddened and wryly amused if it was #3. I can just imagine the day: first the 500 server errors whenever you went to do a Google Search, then the frantic denials that there is a problem, the poor SREs that would be working overtime without any idea how to bring the system back, the pushes toward other projects, the Wall Street damage control, followed by the stock market crash as people realized it wasn't coming back. Imagine how much your habits would have to change if you couldn't access Google: a lot of people get to all their favorite websites through navigational searches.
It'd have to be a major black swan, though, because there are many layers of canaries and metrics checks and rollbacks and backups in place. I think the issue now is that an increasing number of Googlers don't realize why these are important, but Search was built for robustness.