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Comment by nuerow | Hacker News Reader

> I'm so glad to see that they framed this in terms of a bug in a tool designed to prevent human error, rather than simply blaming it on human error.

Wouldn't human error reflect extremely poorly on the company though? I mean, for human error to be the root cause of this mega-outage, that would imply that the company's infrastructure and operational and security practices were so ineffective that a single person screwing up could inadvertently bring the whole company down.

A freak accident that requires all stars to be aligned to even be possible, on the other hand, does not cause a lot of concerns.

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Organisations have a bad habit of using "human error" to blame systemic problems whose true root cause is inadequate leadership on individual low level employees. So, we're glad to see Facebook didn't try this shitty practice.

For a modern example, look for information on Symantec's "A tough day as leaders" in which they try to blame an incident that's clearly a result of at least incompetence by senior management on a single person who they've just fired. This is part of the sequence of events that leads to Symantec no longer being a trusted root CA. You won't find that actual post by Symantec because (of course) once they realised it wasn't doing what they wanted they deleted it, but you can find copies and references to it.

For much older examples, look at the early history of the railway in most of the world. Train crashes, blame the (often dead in the crash and thus unable to defend themselves) train driver, hint that they may have been drunk and were certainly incompetent. Owners carry on profiting from unsafe railway and needn't spend any money making it safer.

Boeing's initial response to the 737MAX crashes comes to mind as well.

> Boeing's initial response to the 737MAX crashes comes to mind as well.

Truth be told, Boeing's response to the 737MAX crashes was to blame people working for other organizations, thus the blame would not fall within neither Boeing engineers/technicians nor the Boeing organization. That's a total and complete cop out.

Pinning the blame on a company employee at least implies that the company itself has some responsibility.

And the Volkswagen emissions scandal too

Yes! I forgot they initially tried to blame it at some low-level engineer. There is a old joke in Germany, predating the VW scandal, saying that is definitely was the night guard.

So, not human error, but inadequate leadership, which is also a human error.

In other words, not human error but human error.

Except an error is supposed to be unintentional.

I mean, sure? mumblemumble is still right though. If you're looking for a cynical reason for everything FB related, then, sure, it's true that a human error looks bad.

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