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I wouldn't say this is a Google only problem. Really, all of these problems of redundancy and recovery have been best considered by militaries well before private companies started to have sufficiently global operations and communications networks that they started thinking about it, too. In the Army Recon Course, they taught us to bounce signals off the ionosphere using hand-held radios if we needed to communicate with an otherwise cut-off remote unit too far past the earth's curvature horizon to get line of sight. And, of course, every unit is drilled in contingency plans to the point that it can operate independently as necessary even when all communication gets cut off and continue to push the overall mission forward even in the absence of further coordination, which, for what it's worth, obviously does present the potential for problems of its own when the mission changes and a disconnected unit doesn't know it, as well explored in Doctor Strangelove.



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