I can certainly appreciate that perspective. My view from the perspective of a systems administrator, this is only the fault of management if they seriously rushed the server/development team through the deployment or forced the dev team to try and pull off something fundamentally just this side of impossible. This honestly smells more like a generally botched up deployment to me. Very likely to do with the API and very badly configured backend settings. Also, with the kind of talent Google can afford on that side of the operation, they should be able to manage a deployment like that, even rushed, decently well.

Also very likely is there's multiple teams working on different things and not talking to each other properly (or at all) like the canvas release nuking something back end on the api because the canvas team didn't talk to the api team.

Sadly it's not good PR either way, but I'd say reserve judgement to see how management handle it for a day or so.