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Comment by bkq | Hacker News Reader

According to their Twitter the root cause of this was a maintenance script that was ran https://twitter.com/Atlassian/status/1511870509973090304. Must have been one hell of a maintenance script to knock out this many services, and cause potential data loss.

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Change is usually the fault. Maintenance script is just one form of change. All the big boys have had this Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS, GCP, always a change

Change is not the cause of a fault.

It's almost the same as saying life is the cause of death in a human.

Change is life, software that don't change is dead software.

Agree. Bad (or no) change management is the cause, not the change itself.

Or stable software.

It's easier to charge a monthly fee for software that's constantly changing than it is for stable software.

Which will shortly outside very few categories become obsolete software.

Must've been a script they got by email from someone.

Would be funnier if it was code hastily cranked out due to an overdue Jira ticket that some middle manager sprang on an unsuspecting code monkey an hour before the weekly standup.

Jira is emotional abuse software.

>While running a maintenance script, a small number of sites were disabled unintentionally

"sites were disabled", making it sound like they flipped a bit in the database, when they have clearly destroyed a lot of data.

A guess, but it sounds like they might have screwed up some sort of master reference table that maps customers to services and data stores. So it's possible they have all the data, but lost the map.

I guess “disabled” is a lie at this case.

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