More often, this kind of error out of Google comes from the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Joe or Jane Noogler has just been brought into

More often, this kind of error out of Google comes from the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Joe or Jane Noogler has just been brought into the team, and their starting project was to improve indexing. They succeeded in doing so by attaching the Drive data to an indexing service created after Drive existed. It's working great and has a 10-20X speedup. But oops... That new indexing system has a 5-million-element hard limit built in, and nobody caught it until they went to production. J. Noogler is too new to have realized this could have been an issue so they never started the escalation / customer messaging processs.