Google wreaks havoc on our company’s calendars: lost data and security breaches

This sounds like a severe technical problem that has to be analyzed and fixed by real experts. I doubt that these kind of people do night and weekend shifts. And unless the problem is widespread, I don't think they're calling those experts in from their weekends for a single incident.

Sounds like a database migration [by Google that is] or dump/reimport that hasn't preserved the original primary/foreign keys and so items are now owned by other people. Oh the joys of referential integrity.

The ownership of things seems to have been kept within your company but not so for individual items in the calendar which could mean that random other people are seeing your calendar entries appearing in their calendars.

"Oops" is the operative word from Google.

Are all of your employees using two-factor authentication? Are you 100% that this could not have happened via a normal security breach via a number of your employees' accounts?

GMail accounts get hacked regularly, often due to users using the same password for different services, or just getting keylogged somewhere.

I'm very curious too see how this pans out. Good luck with the recovery!

We're having a different issue on our companies' shared calendar -- all of our events are duplicated. Apparently Google know about it but there doesn't seem to be any fixes happening.

I've used Google's services from both an end-user at a company who uses Google Apps, and from a IT/Infrastructure Manager who moved his company to Google Apps.

For 95% of businesses who don't do a lot of intensive activities (be it scheduling, emailing, or anything else), google apps works fine.

If you're in that 5% who push the limits of your email/calendaring setup, then Google Apps (and their lackluster support) aren't the choice to make.

We had a support issue where the CEO couldn't send email to the company-wide mailing alias -- every time he did so, it was marked as 'bulk' email, and rejected. Google's support was non-existent (read this support page -- did that help? No? That's all I can do). Fast forward to a few weeks later, when users would randomly get non-delivery notifications when sending email internally. Google mentioned that they couldn't see the notifications come from their servers.

Another option was when a trial ran out, they'll lock EVERYONE out of email, calendars, and everything else until the trial is cancelled, or, until they pay. If an admin unknowingly signs up for something that will cost him a few extra bucks/user/month, and then forgets to update a credit card, every user in the organization will be locked out, and they can't call support (because you can't get a phone pin when you are locked out of a domain like that).

If you want minimal hassles, then Google Apps works great for small places (up to 20 users). Then, it's probably wise, from both a business risk and a infrastructure standpoint to just start running your own.

Obviously having something like this happen sucks. If nothing else, you should be able to have a specified timetable for updates (every 4 hours, for example), even if it's just "we're still analyzing this issue" or "we are evaluating potential solutions".

That said, when you're dealing with a cloud-based application, fixing a problem like this is not going to be easy. First they need a clear enough understanding of how this happened to prevent it from happening again. Next you have to start coming up with scripts to correct the issue. After that you have to test the scripts to make sure you don't make things worse. Finally you can update production.

Most likely the support team has engaged an operations team and probably some developers as well. But even if they've been working through the weekend, there's no guarantee that they'll have a solution yet.

Or maybe Google doesn't have the necessary people on call over the weekend so nothing has actually been done. I can't say.

I sync everything with the cloud and have a local backup which allows me to rollback any change to any file. So in the event that the cloud goes rogue I can just disconnect and restore from backup. But also, in the event that my office gets burnt down, I can still access all my data from the cloud. I personally would never have a system where the only point of access to mission critical data is through 'the cloud'.

You failed to perform due diligence before deciding to rely on this service. I wrote about this kind of thing over a year ago: http://lee-phillips.org/gcaldisaster/ If you just Google (hah!) "calendar privacy" today my article, and a few other relevant warnings, are on the first page.

Remember, according to Derek Sivers, everything is your fault.

Maybe they tested Google Spanner on Elezea's bit of data?

So it's being dealt with then. Not sure when wording an attention seeking post and submitting it to HN became standard operating procedure in these situations. Patience remains a virtue when this stuff happens.

Don't thrust the cloud...