[stjohnswarts]

seems like something an engineer might fix on their own time if they were feeling feisty about the matter. Something tells me if it went on for 20 years it was an edge case that only very rarely came up and was mostly a non-issue.

[trasz]

I suspect it was definitely an issue, it’s just that most companies like Google don’t care about reliability, only availability, and it might just not show up in their stats.