[shadowgovt]

I think you're on to something. One of the challenges that teams at Google have is service dependencies. In theory, Google is one big, happy family and everyone is responsible for everyone's code. In practice, teams have focuses, software interdepends and interoperates, and mistakes get made at the margin where the linkages between two software systems are neither team's direct responsibility---or the responsibility of both teams.

It's not malice, it's incentives and information flow. Integrating with a service that one is not responsible for, one can get tripped by unknown unknowns that the team that maintains the service has failed the document. And while a migration mistake is embarrassing, software engineering teams are generally rewarded for task completion, not for the time spent preparing for a failure that doesn't occur.

[byecomputer]

Really, universal problems that all large corporations and bureaucracies are vulnerable to. Overlaps or gaps in responsibility (breeding plausible deniability), lack of communication, and management issues (hence dysfunctional incentives) are difficult to root out and cost a lot of money to track down and fix.