[rachelbythebay]

Thanks for the language tip! I always wondered if there was some kind of local connection which made it work and was completely opaque to everyone back in Mountain View. It seems nobody knows, or if they know, they aren't telling.

Orkut was great stuff. Every time they went down, I'd get paged (if on call that week) because every single person in Brazil would go back to the login page and start submitting the form over, and over, and over...

I wasn't on-call for Orkut, but rather something else it depended on. All of that login load translated through to us. It got to the point where we'd interpret a load spike as "let's check Orkut" and when it got to "yep, it's down", we'd just ignore it.