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Comment by unityByFreedom | Hacker News Reader

> Is it a whale?

TikTok is my guess. ByteDance is valued at 250 billion. Plus, the change was pushed in the middle of the night, which would be daytime in Asia. Certainly there are other development teams in Asia, but considering the scale of the change it likely comes from HQ, and Fastly's whale in Asia would be them.

edit They may have lost TikTok at the end of last year, either partially or completely [1]. Anyone know what they use now? Akamai, or maybe they stealthily switched back to Fastly?

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/fastly-lost-tiktok-but-ceo-...

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Middle of the night? It was at noon for most of Europe

What are Europe's whales?

Lots of tech companies have engineering offices with SRE responsabilities in Europe timezones. Could be anyone really.

My guess is this level of change would come from senior devs in the main office.

Are you implying that no senior devs or main offices are located in europe?

Also, just because the rollout to fastly happened at a morning EU time, doesn't mean that the change was made. If there's a deployment pipeline, it could have been made 2-3 hours earlier, or even the day before

I'm saying a big network change is probably going to be executed while HQ is awake and in the loop. In my experience the most skillful devs aren't the most senior.

We don't know much about the specific client configuration change that triggered this condition yet. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big company wide infrastructure change.

To me it sounds plausible that an SRE team in an alternate location made a change scoped to their permission level, following company-directed playbooks, which eventually triggered the faulty condition at Fastly.

Seems likely to me this was a change pushed from outside the US given the timing.

Many big tech companies (and individual products within the company) rotate oncall/release/SRE responsibilities between NA and EU. HQ doesn't need to be awake in these cases.

gov.uk ?

Spotify is the first that comes to mind, if you’re looking for a big tech company headquartered in Europe.

My guess is reddit. It was down yesterday due to this.

Why would reddit push such a change at 4am SF time? It's also unlikely that a high load at that time would trigger anything. Reddit's peak activity times are US daylight hours.

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