Google was notified. Google was told to preserve records and stop auto-deletion. Google said it did. Google kept auto-deletion running during discovery. If you want to play semantics instead of discussing Google's lying and destruction of evidence, then that's up to you.

From the article:

US: Google falsely claimed to suspend auto-deletion But the DOJ says Google repeatedly provided false information to the US about its chat-retention practices:

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentiall>y relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours.

All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had "put a legal hold in place" that "suspends auto-deletion." Indeed, during the United States' investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.