I used to be heavily involved in those, it was a process where we’d take a week to prepare for it, do weeks of post-mortems, and print a run of t-shirts for everyone involved to celebrate pulling one off successfully.

These days the team running them announces that it’s happening in an opt-in announcement group at 8am, pulls the plug at 9am, and barely anyone even notices because the automation handles it so gracefully.

Mostly I just miss the t-shirts, as the <datacenter>-storm events got the coolest graphical designs...