As the coronavirus spread and more countries issued stay-at-home orders, people flocked to video chat services for work and to check in on family and friends. Google saw Meet undergo 30-times growth in the early months of the pandemic; soon enough, the service was hosting up to 100 million meeting participants each day.
Amid all the profound changes people have made in response to Covid-19, the infrastructure that undergirds the internet experienced a shift in usage patterns, too, as people traded office hours for home isolation. You essentially took the peak and extended it over a far longer period of the day, says Ben Treynor Sloss, Google vice president of engineering.The usage went way up, but it was mostly that the use looked more like peak most of the day, rather than that the peaks went up dramatically.
In these exercises, around 10,000 employees at a time will simulate handling some sort of crisis, ranging from a localized natural disaster to a Godzilla attack.
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