Google is better designed than that. No single cable failure could cause a user-facing outage of more than a few minutes.
I'm pretty sure he was joking
Maybe it was sarcasm all the way down?
I hope not.. If it takes more than a couple of minutes for you to figure out how to plug in a cable, I would wonder why google let you in the building
If it's a main multimegawatt power cable, it could take a while to plug back in (first the charred corpse needs to be removed). But it doesn't take long to redirect all traffic to another datacenter.