No. That's not how it would be done at google. they invented a binary protocol to handle things like this reliably. And that protocol goes over an integrity-

No. That's not how it would be done at google. they invented a binary protocol to handle things like this reliably. And that protocol goes over an integrity-checking network transport. It's more likely an odd edge case occurred and somehow got past the normal QC checks- say, an RPC returned an error but the error handler didn't do a retry, it just fell through.