[dwild]

I think he meant he used the Flush Cache functionality of 8.8.8.8 but emails still failed on Gmail until their cache was invalidated (so Gmail probably is not using 8.8.8.8, or the flush cache doesn't actually works as intended).

[lathiat]

caches are hierachical. Even your local machine most of the time now with recent OS releases will cache records, then your home router or some other DNS server on your network will often cache things before then referring to your ISPs or Googles DNS server.

Invalidating the cache at one doesn't invalidate the cache downstream of them if they already looked the record up recently. But it does mean that anyone who hadn't looked up the record will get the correct result straight away.