"We once narrowly missed a major outage because the engineer who submitted the would-be-triggering change unplugged their desktop computer before the change could propagate". Sorry, what?
I do think Google should be more open about their internal outages. This one in particular was very famous internally.
But my favorite incident will forever be the time they had to drill out a safe because they were disaster-testing the password vault system and discovered that the key needed to restore the password vault system was stored in s aafe, the combination for which had been moved into the password vault system. Only with advanced, modern technology can you lock the keys to the safe in the safe itself with so many steps!
Great story to be sure—-but I’m going to call it a success. They did the end-to-end testing and caught it then instead of real life.
But still, "it broke while engineers were staring at it and trying to break it" is a better scenario than "it broke surprisingly while engineers were trying to do something else."