Fixing Google's Outage by Inverting a Binary Tree
Description
A screenshot of a Reddit thread from the 'r/programming' subreddit, viewed in dark mode. The main post, by user u/The_Grandmother, reports a massive outage: 'Every single google service is currently out, including their cloud console. Let's take a moment to feel the pain of their devops team'. This post has 4,000 upvotes. Below, a highly-awarded and upvoted (1,900 points) comment from user u/lazic_ sarcastically asks, 'Did they try to fix them by inverting a binary tree?'. The humor stems from mocking Google's famous and often-criticized reliance on esoteric, algorithm-heavy technical interview questions, like inverting a binary tree. The joke juxtaposes a theoretical computer science problem, which has little relevance to practical incident response, with a real-world, catastrophic system failure, highlighting the perceived disconnect between Google's hiring criteria and the skills needed to actually run their services
Comments
13Comment deleted
The problem wasn't inverting the binary tree; the problem was the global authentication service was the root node, and they had no pointers to it
Some SRE must’ve taken “invert a binary tree” literally - now the root of the global load-balancer points to /dev/null and the error budget is gone before the postmortem template loads
The real irony is that somewhere a Google SRE is desperately trying to access the runbook on Google Docs while the incident commander is attempting to join a Google Meet war room, both realizing they should have kept that 'legacy' on-prem wiki server running after all
When your entire cloud infrastructure goes down and someone asks if you tried inverting a binary tree to fix it - because apparently that's the skill that determines if you're qualified to keep Google's services running. Nothing says 'production-ready engineer' quite like being able to solve LeetCode mediums while your pager is melting and every SLA is burning. At least the DevOps team can take comfort knowing they aced their whiteboard interviews before this career-defining outage
Every Google service down, console included - turns out Auth is the last monolith; the runbook starts with “log in to roll back,” and without a break-glass path the rollback button just says 401
Google's outage: When the monolith's shared fate theorem strikes, no binary tree inversion saves the dependency DAG
When the global control plane faceplants, inverting a binary tree won’t flip IAM back on - this isn’t O(log n), it’s O(all regions) with retries DDoS’ing your own fleet
Ну конечно, а как же иначе. Все программисты знают, что умение развернуть бинарное дерево на листочке и объяснить принцип абстракции на пальцах решает проблемы на проде просто по волшебству. Comment deleted
i don't get it Comment deleted
It's referencing Google's love for tasks that are almost completely divorced from reality during their interviews Comment deleted
lol ok, thanks Comment deleted
Funny, but when you take a moment to think about it, programmers != devops, so probably programmer's won't fix this, and I'm not sure if they ask these kind of questions on devops interviews... 🙂 Comment deleted
"So, you want to be a DevOps, eh? Invert binary tree using Bash. And then find all palindrome paths in nginx" Comment deleted