[korfuri]

Possibly, but probably not. Google tends to have follow-the-sun rotations staffed by SRE as the first line of defense, with an escalation path to devs if necessary.

SREs may not have intricate knowledge of the code but they have an array of tools that can mitigate problems, and they're software engineers too, so they can debug this themselves if need be. Their focus however won't be on fixing the bug, it will be on stopping the bleeding. Typically they'll check if this is an issue introduced in a recent rollout and roll that back. In the case of Search they also have an array of tactical tools - someone mentioned that a specific website was causing this, they probably have a way to quickly and temporarily delist this specific result.

The focus will be on recovering ASAP, figuring out the details and the long-term fix later. That later can be during business hours on Monday.