From the article, the root cause was a configuration change: "In essence, the root cause of Sunday’s disruption was a configuration change that was intended fo

From the article, the root cause was a configuration change: "In essence, the root cause of Sunday’s disruption was a configuration change that was intended for a small number of servers in a single region. The configuration was incorrectly applied to a larger number of servers across several neighboring regions...Google’s engineering teams detected the issue within seconds, but diagnosis and correction took far longer than our target of a few minutes. Once alerted, engineering teams quickly identified the cause of the network congestion, but the same network congestion which was creating service degradation also slowed the engineering teams’ ability to restore the correct configurations, prolonging the outage." I do think we should blame the configuration system, it is clearly not robust enough, not tested enough, and not resilient in case of failure - a bug in the config can bring down the system which manages the config and stop them fixing the original bug.