Re: "We asked Google for an explanation."
Nope. Good guess though. After all, it's worked before. But the article has now been updated to say "it's a bug that will be corrected". Which is another favourite.
There's a story, I don't know if it's actually true mind, about Macy's department store in the 1920s. If a customer cut up really rough, and was a really entitled arse abot their complaint then the manager could summon a particular guy. Don't know what his day job was, but his side role was to be sacked. So said manager would listen to the complaint and then tell the customer that they'd deal with the person responsible. This guy would then be summoned, dressed-down in front of the customer and told that they were dismissed. Then it was back to wherever they came from an on with whatever they were doing. Unless Macy's had so may annoying customers that the guy was getting "sacked" every half hour...
Anyway I feel that it's time Google got themselves a nice sacrificial engineer - perhaps with a particularly fetching hat - that they can publicly wheel out and sack whenever they want to use this excuse. It can be the same one every time, its not like they don't know that we know that they're lying through their teeth. But at least it makes the pretence more interesting. Perhaps a trained actor, who can cry on cue and give us a better show...