Most outages aren't so obvious as this one, and any ping will fail intermittently (often because the ping agent has a failure.) Google definitely has loads of p

Most outages aren't so obvious as this one, and any ping will fail intermittently (often because the ping agent has a failure.) Google definitely has loads of pings hitting Google Calendar in various ways. Exposing this monitoring to the public is not practical or really useful. (And would aid would-be attackers.)