Worth pointing out that IRC isn't necessarily the first choice for coordinating a response, but it is a great low-dependency, independent fallback. IRC runs on

Worth pointing out that IRC isn't necessarily the first choice for coordinating a response, but it is a great low-dependency, independent fallback. IRC runs on a stack that is completely independent from the rest of Google prod (it's just a Linux machine running an IRC daemon). So when almost everything else goes down, so long as basic network routing is still working, IRC is still up.