Ask HN: Have you ever caused an outage on a big website by accident?(as an user) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever caused an outage on a big website by accident?(as an user)

Did they notice? What were the repercussions?

No Repercussion, but yes I was beta testing an interface, using it normally, the company must of been testing it live publically, and it was connected to their production database.. I was testing the edit user feature, and all I can say I believe the code was a little messed up and lacking a few "Where" statements... Short Version my profile edit: My testing "Mr. Andersoned" the whole person details/user tables..

Don't believe I have.

> Did they notice?

If they didn't they aren't doing their job.

> What were the repercussions?

If a user can cause an outage on a website through normal non-malicious use there should be no repercussions for the user. A website should defend itself from common user mistakes. If it doesn't then fhe website is buggy. Of course, this doesn't include clueless governors getting upset at someone viewing the page source.

>If they didn't they aren't doing their job.

I meant that as did they notice it was a user who caused it instead of an unknown bug.

Any outage should be noticed and the cause identified, bug or user.

Yes, the cause should be identified, in ideal conditions.

But saying that they're not doing their job because they struggle to identify the specific user that caused a bug is a bit of a stretch.

I didn't say anything about "identifying a particular user". When I said "the cause identified, bug or user" I didn't mean the particular user, but the series of user actions that lead to the outage. Outages caused by user action shouldn't be able to happen, so I think they are really what you call an unknown bug. Any person running a website that tries to blame a user for non-malicious actions that cause an outage is just trying to shift blame from where it rightly belongs.

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