To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
I suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
