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Comment by dmlittle | Hacker News Reader

Mistakes happen, highly available systems fail, being enraged and demanding heads isn't going to make anyone happy but just scared. A full investigation is probably going to happen and steps will be taken to make sure this doesn't happen again but it's hard to blame it on a particular individual. Ideally you'd have steps such that one person alone can't screw up and it also requires other people to let that happen.

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Shit happens, and rage is pointless. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that even the best HA just isn't that good. Certainly I wouldn't care to fly in a plane that critically depended on any web provider, even Amazon.

I feel like that comparison is less compelling after the Boeing 737 MAX debacle.

Yeah, I feel it. And as if I needed another reason not to get on a plane these days.

I was thinking the other day about how I would explain to my son about how much more appealing air travel was in the 90s. The food wasn't great on U.S. carriers but most of the other details were so much more pleasant.

hmmm, maybe you're right, could have been a gremlin that had chewed on one of the cables.

It's not a gremlin and at the end of the day it's probably a misconfiguration or bug somewhere but it doesn't help anyone to point fingers and blame. A system probably went through a design phase, why didn't the reviewers of the design didn't catch this? The implementation was probably reviewed by peers, why didn't they catch this? It might have gone through QA, why didn't they catch this? And the list can go on and on.

At the end of the day a mistake was made and it should be fixed but being enraged doesn't help anyone. Figure out what went wrong, how to make sure it doesn't happen again and do it.

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