It is indisputable that the Google Chrome updater crashed thousands of Macs, primarily those used by video production studios. FFS, the smoking gun is right there in their updater logs:
GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[1213/0x7fffc9d683c0] [lvl=3] -[KSLockFile(PrivateMethods) deletePathIfSymlink: except: ] Found and deleted symlink at path /var
And it logs an error message if it can’t delete /var, which means nobody in Google QA reviews log errors before saying “ship it!”.
But how did they spin it? (emphasis mine)
“a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled”
There are reports that it has affected people who have SIP enabled, which seems to be due to them having gone through multiple OS upgrades, starting from a version that didn’t have SIP, with permissions somehow getting changed from the defaults over the years.
The reason it hit video studios so hard is that they were all running external Thunderbolt 2 GPUs to accelerate Avid, and to run the required unsigned kernel drivers, they had to turn off SIP.
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Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.