Dear G Suite Customer,
We are truly living in unique times. The coronavirus pandemic is impacting everyone from our families, to our businesses, to our first responders who are bravely on the front lines. As the situation continues to affect our world, we wanted to reach out and update you on how we’re supporting our employees, our community and you—our customers and partners.
Above all else, our thoughts are with those affected by the virus, particularly those who are sick. We wish them a speedy recovery, and we remain inspired by our healthcare workers and others who are caring for people around the world.
Supporting Our Employees, Vendors, and Temporary Staff
It is imperative that we take care of our people—including employees, vendors and temporary staff—and the communities they work in. We’ve taken actions to reduce the need for people to come into our offices across the globe, based on local conditions. At the same time, we know that customers rely on Google’s products and services, and we are committed to keeping them running smoothly. A limited number of staff continue to work in some offices, because certain jobs can only be done onsite—like those who need to access the most sensitive content for customer safety and security.
To further support our temporary staff and vendors, last week we established a COVID-19 fund, which will allow these workers globally to take paid sick leave if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19 or can’t come into work because they’re quarantined. We’ll continue to make sure our workforce is supported as this crisis evolves.
Helping Our Community At-Large
We’re focused on delivering solutions to help support our broader community. This includes partnering with the U.S. government in developing a website dedicated to COVID-19 education, prevention and resources, as well as hosting a COVID-19 Open Research Dataset with more than 20,000 articles, in hopes this will help spur new innovations to tackle the pandemic.
We’re also working with state and local governments to develop chatbots to help overtasked agencies respond more quickly to citizen requests, build telehealth solutions for clinics and hospitals, and assist schools with distance-learning programs. And, right now on the Google homepage, we’re promoting the “Do the Five” campaign to raise awareness of simple measures people can take to slow the spread of the disease.
Ensuring Uptime for Customers and Partners
We understand the importance of keeping all of your systems up-and-running during this time. We maintain comprehensive business continuity arrangements that are regularly tested as part of our ongoing business continuity and disaster recovery program. We’re actively monitoring our services to ensure we meet our contractual commitments in our service-level agreements (SLAs). And, as many of you would like to understand more about our business continuity efforts, we’ll be sharing a webinar in the coming days that will provide a more in-depth look at our processes.
We also know that, for many customers, this time has meant even more disruption to their businesses, with extreme swings in customer demand and stress on certain channels. That’s why we’re working across product areas where excess capacity may exist to help avoid disruptions, as well as partnering with telco providers to ensure we manage congestion on our networks. For retailers—who have been particularly affected by the crisis—we’ve initiated Black Friday/Cyber Monday protocols, which includes architecture reviews, tabletop exercises, war rooms and more. And, when it comes to service and support, we’ve built redundancy across locations to maintain a consistent experience for customers.
A moment like this is a reminder about how we all need to band together to overcome challenges and complexities. Please find below a set of FAQs on our readiness to support customers during this period. Our teams are here for you, and we’ll continue to keep you updated and informed.
Sincerely,
The Google Cloud team
Frequently-Asked Questions:
Q: What is Google doing to monitor the situation?
A: We are keeping a close eye on developments related to the coronavirus. Our global security and illness response teams are actively monitoring the situation through many trusted information sources such as the WHO and CDC. To protect our customers, partners and employees, we're restricting international and domestic travel, encouraging, and in some cases requiring, employees to work from home, and other measures. For more information on what we’re doing to help, visit our recent blog post.
Q: How is customer support being handled in regions where employees aren't working from the office?
A: We’ve run several tests of our support capacity for offices in regions affected by the virus, and we maintain business continuity arrangements, including to provide ongoing service and support for our customers. In addition, our engineering teams are well-placed to perform their tasks when working remotely. We're confident that our systems and procedures can continue to support our customers and partners during this time.
Q: Will there be delays in certain cloud services or support resolutions?
A: At this stage, we do not expect delays. We're confident that our systems and procedures can continue to support our customers and partners during this time.
Q: Should we expect any disruptions, downtime, or latency in regions affected by the virus?
A: No, at this stage, we do not expect any direct user-facing impact as a result of our response to the situation. We will keep customers informed through the usual channels should the situation change.
Q: What is Google doing to ensure that Meet has sufficient capacity as customers move meetings to Hangouts Meet?
A: As more customers begin working remotely in response to COVID-19, Google is doing its part to help them stay connected and productive. We are committed to helping distributed employees connect virtually using Hangouts Meet. In order to accommodate increased usage, we have substantially increased Meet capacity globally and our engineering teams are monitoring usage 24x7 to ensure capacity needs are met. Additionally, we have increased our customer service capacity with additional engineers to support our customers during this period.