Part 3/13:
In the immediate aftermath, speculation was rife. Some believed the outage might have been a cybersecurity attack, reminiscent of notable past incidents like the 2016 DDoS attack on Dine, the DNS provider orchestrated by the Mirai botnet. Given the timing, some even hinted at geopolitical motives, imagining foreign retaliation—possibly Iran—playing a role.
However, investigations quickly pointed elsewhere. It was later revealed that the root cause was an internal technical failure, not malicious hacking. Google itself acknowledged the issue, emphasizing that it was triggered by an operational mistake rather than a cyber assault.