[Zenst]

I speculate that for many companies, work from home has been at most, less impacting than they thought.

However, I'd speculate that in this instance, when you get that .0001% problem, less hands on deck makes work from home aspects less easier. Akin to remotely fixing somebodies PC over standing behind them.

With that premise I'd speculate in this instance that whilst not the root cause, may of been a small ripple that led to that root cause and/or lead to a slower resolution than what would normally get.

Those speculations aside, it will only highlight what that some tooling needs to adjust for remote workers as does design and set-ups more. Water cooler talk is not just for gossip and a counter would be more regular on-line group socialising at a work level so that not only the companies but the workers can fully adapt and embrace the work medium; But so the kinks and areas that need polishing can be polished and made better for all.

Lastly, I'd speculate that I'm totally wrong and yet what I said may well anecdote with some out there and resonate with others.

[throwaway201103]

You might be right for the smaller company where physical access to the machines in the data center is necessary at a certain point in the troubleshooting process. I work at such a place myself. I would guess, however, that Google moved beyond that quite some time ago. It's simply not practical, with or without having offices with people in them.

[marcan_42]

All the access to the services is remote, but I'd say having the entire team in the same room does help coordinate incident response.

[herodoturtle]

Agreed. And I'd hope that their plan B of "get the whole team on Hangouts" isn't met with connection / auth issues. Kinda feel bad for the googlers. Hope they get this right.

[marcan_42]

When I was there they had an IRC network for this reason. I hope they still do. Not quite the same as VoIP but fewer dependencies...

[kuschku]

That's why the network folks at Google and AWS use IRC for just that purpose. Simple, no external dependencies, just works.