Are BGP updates for Google's own router configurations really so frequent that they can't pay an engineer to at least monitor the propagation of configuration changes? In this case, a human would have instantly seen that the update was a) rejected (as explained in the postmortem), and b) holy shit, WHY DID THE ROUTER CHANGE ITS OWN CONFIGURATION TO BLOW AWAY ALL OF THE GCE ROUTES!?!

I'm all for automation, but WTF? Insert even a semi-competent engineer in the loop to monitor the configuration change as it propagates around and the entire problem could have been addressed almost trivially, as the human engineers eventually decided to do.