If Google Chat is down per https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/, the ability for Google engineers to communicate among themselves impaired, despite SREs having IRC as a backup.
Don't worry, they're not following the "deprecate and cancel" playbook for that. They seem to be using the "copy a competitor poorly" one. The few features I liked about it, that distinguished it from Slack, disappeared in the latest update.
