Why does it matter if he's guessing or not?
No shit Google has plans in place for outages.
But what are these plans, are they any good... a respected industry figure who's CV includes being at Google for 10 years doesn't need to go into detail describing the IRC fallback to be believed and trusted that there is such a thing.
No-one knows or cares who made the statement, it may as well have been 'water is wet', it was useless and adds nothing but noise.
I have replied to my initial comment with provide some additonal context: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=28752431. Hope that helps.