I know what you meant; however, reports should not be tailored to individual experience. The facts should be reported clearly. I’m happy they are open about the whole incident. -4 hours was more like two days for us.
Our stack? Multiple OC wan, 10G LAN with 1Gpbs clients. About 4,000+ users, EDU. We are super happy using Google. No complaints! Google is doing great.
It's hard to tailor a postmortem like this to everyone's individual experience but it is surprising to me that your experience is so different.