Postmortem:
unbounded auto-scaling of lambda combined with oversight on internal rate limits caused unforseen internal ddos.
Just wait for the medium article “How I ran up a $400 million AWS bill.”
"On how I learned 'recursion'"
I asked my friend who's a senior dev if he ever uses recursion at work. He said whenever he sees recursion in a code review, he tells the junior dev to knock it off.
He created a lambda function that spawned more lambda functions and the rest is history
If he actually knows how to crash Amazon, you have a new business opportunity, albeit not a very nice one...
It'd be hilarious if you kept that impression going for the duration of the outage.