The woman behind this team called DiRT (Disaster Recovery Testing) Team is Kripa Krishnan and through this process, the team makes sure that Google can keep itself running no matter what happens. Kripa and her team create all kinds of doomsday scenarios possible for Earthlings. Sometimes DiRT makes Martians invade the earth. Other times they create earthquake or a chemical attack. The DiRT teams work is to strik internally at Google targets without giving a warning just like your local police conduct secret mock terrorist attacks to be every ready for the actual think. The DiRT team led by director Kripa has perfected the art of breaking Google over the past nine years and they are still trying to be the bad guys at Google. Despite the humor-inspired scenarios she inflicts on her co-workers, the tests themselves are very, very serious, she told Business Insider. The mock chaos that Kripa and her team create include taking down actual Google systems like a whole data center just to see how Googlers will react to it. The flip side is that if Kripa and her team mess things up too badly for too long and cause Google to have a serious outage, there will be money lost and hell to pay. Before each test, people gather in various “war rooms,” sometimes located all over the world, Kripa told Business Insider. “We have intense situations in the war room. There’s like 20-30 people sitting there. The room is warm. Everyone is very, very high on caffeine, ready to go and everybody’s angry all the time,” Kripa added. She also gave example of how her teams tests sometimes go wrong. For instance, in the middle of one massively orchestrated test on the network that could have taken down a big chunk of Google, the team noticed that a popular app used by millions of people was slowing down. They didn’t think their test would cause that. But they didn’t know for sure and they wondered if they should abort the test, which would also be dangerous at that particular moment, she recalls. Within 15 minutes they determined their test was not the problem. “But for those 15 minutes, we were just yipping at each other. Shouting, tears in the war room,” she recalls. And the funny thing is that she gets a fat salary to create all this shit at Google.
