Did they mistake it for one of their own services people were using?
We need to have something like reddit gold. but the money goes to a charity of your choice, and whoever you golded gets a badge next to their comment. I’d do that to this if I could.
They’re outsourcing many of their workforce abroad. Like Microsoft, I expect more of these “isolated” accidents to happen.
Company tries to cut costs by outsourcing to another company with lowly paid employees in another country, often India or Pakistan, where the outsourced labour (that all too frequently hasn’t been properly trained in the company’s procedures) often doesn’t share the same first language leading to misunderstandings, made worse by the difference in office hours meaning the teams often can’t communicate with eachother in real time (the timezone factor is a big one IMO).
It’s an issue affecting a lot of tech companies right now, including where I work (HPE). But I guess it must work out as being cheaper despite the issues, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening.
Let the people who installed/created it maintain it or let a bunch of new folk do it, which is likely to work best?
The abroad part isn’t the issue. We’re a global village with the Internet now, after all. It’s the outsourcing part that’s the issue.
Interesting point, I am not sure I fully agree.
I work for a company with operations across the world. Education systems that lead to citizens who are deeply literal and have any shred of critical thinking stamped out of them are a real problem with communications.
On the US side, I can and have adapted to communicate effectively with those colleagues, but it’s less about English being their third or fourth language, and more about our tendency to speak colloquially, and their tendency to not do so.
To their credit, if my livelihood was tied to working in a second or third language, I probably would have trouble with non-literal communications in that language as well.
Different systems, different work cultures, etc. make communication difficult.
OTOH, we have no opportunity to get to know each other and/or bond over food. Ribs, and something spicy from them, and a bit of time to chat would go a long way to resolving some of those difficulties.
Now that I think about it, I wonder how we can pull off an intercultural cooking exchange with those colleagues, without sounding like a giant racist when I post it on the internal social site. Seriously could build some bridges.
Better article:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/unisuper_google_cloud_outage_caused/
They restored from another cloud service. Were I in charge, I’d still be leery of not having that data on my own drives. I have my Windows libraries mapped to my ghetto RAID 0, and those folders are in turn backed to Google. If all else fails, I have a local backup. And this story reminds me, I haven’t installed VEEAM on this new PC…
Yeah, this has definitely happened before, we just don’t hear about it in the news. I am personally aware of a Canadian non-profit whose Google accounts were nuked with no notice or explanation last year, leading to massive disruptions for 150 staff and even more clients. They never found out why, and had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account
