Wait, how was this literal incident not highly embarrassing to the company? "Our internal security team has been known to put up unapproved messages in popups that only apply to specific partners/vendors". Doesn't even matter what the content was in that context.

When you do consider the content/context, then we need to consider that this vendor/partner (IRI) was likely offended by the implications and the relationship between Google and the vendor/partner was likely damaged.

IRI did the right thing in not publicly commenting on the issue, though, so we'll never know for sure what actual affect this incident had on that relationship.

Tool becomes external because a customer needed the functionality. Regression was silent until the customer found it. “Whoops, we couldn’t possibly have seen that coming”.

It happens.