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Comment by paul_f | Hacker News Reader

I love how it almost suggests it was a customer's fault. If only they hadn't changed their settings!

I know you’re mostly joking, but it does no such thing. The blog post explicitly states it was a “valid customer configuration change”.

The Fastly blog does not blame the user. The BBC article kind of suggests it ("One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown").

Yeah, you’re right, the headline is clickbaity.

The BBC article includes the line "a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug".

That's 'bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"'-level stuff compared to the clickbait headline, though.

What's your proposed headline?

Fastly bug triggered internet meltdown

That's a great headline for yesterday.

This article details a new piece of information, and the headline reflects that.

No, it is designed to be suggestive -- to shift attention and perhaps even blame. And of course the BBC picked up on it for clickbait reasons. Brilliant (but perhaps evil) PR by Fastly.

Customer configuration is an irrelevant detail that should have been left out until a full RCA. What does it matter that it was valid? So an invalid configuration would have meant it was indeed the _customer's_ fault??

A more fair treatment would have been, "a customer pentested us and won".

An edge case triggered an edge condition at our edge location.

"Edge cases" and "conditions" are some of my trigger phrases. Given enough time or users, they are inevitable and passing them off as rare to avoid dealing with them, especially when you're aware of their existence, drives me up the wall.

Unless it's an edge use case you're not supporting, don't sell me your cost avoidance on any production systems.

And edge case is just that though? Something that hadn't been thought of, and makes stuff break, then you can figure out a fix.

I don't know any dev that would agree with "passing them off as rare to avoid dealing with them" - rather, "it's a low priority, but it needs fixing" or "ok, this is an edge case, but holy crap its a bad one"

A very edgy comment! Well done.

quite edge-ucational I must say

It suggests it only as long as someone doesn't read the article.

The way I read it, they were trying to communicate the fact that a customer fiddling with their own configuration brought down large swathes of the internet for everybody else. That absolutely deserves to be in the headline.

>It suggests it only as long as someone doesn't read the article.

Which is why it's clickbait. Sensational title, humdrum article.

That's not clickbait, it's editiorial discretion. A customer's actions did take down Fastly for other customers. What about that is misleading or untrue?

Should be "Untested code triggers problems"

hey hey, production is just big test.

It could just as easily have been tested extensively but no testing is 100% guaranteed, especially in a world wide service as complex as a CDN. People who think perfect code comes purely from testing are delusional.

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