How do you know that there hasn't been a major data loss event for Google? Would you be able to tell the difference if, say, a quarter of their data were gone?

(I agree that it would be more visible if Amazon had a major data loss, but the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't. In fact, can you name a major data loss of which you do know? (I can't, but that may just be because I don't follow these things.) Surely one can't conclude from the fact that there are few well publicised examples that businesses do not suffer such losses.)

The breakdown that is going to happen when Facebook and/or Gmail's database gets dumped and uploaded to The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks is going to be mind-blowingly tremendous.

On top of that, I wouldn't expect any slowdown after "a major privacy event". I fully believe that we are in a world where very few organizational secrets can be kept. Virtually no one, including major corporations and governments, has a correct concept of what is necessary to protect digital data. In the early days of the war, when everyone is still able to use the internet, the intelligence leakage is just going to be astonishing.