I feel bad for the person who made the mistake. Even though its obviously a systemic problem, and highly unlikely to be an act of negligence, Im sure he/she doesnt feel too hot right now.
People tend to forget that "fixing it" isn't just technical, it involves process, too. Every new hire that whines about change control and downtime windows would be the first to suggest them, were they troubleshooting the outage that demonstrated the need.
When that happens, you do just what Joyent did here: you send out an embarrassed email to customers, everyone else in the ops team gets a few cheap laughs at the miscreant's expense, you have a meeting about it, discuss lessons learned, and you move on.
Everyone screws up. Everything goes down once in a while. This is why you build in redundancy at every level.
Other things that have caused outages: lack of power capacity planning, unplugging an unrelated test server from the network (go go gadget BGP), cascading backup power failure, building maintenance taking down AC units, expensive equipment caching ARP replies indefinitely… the list goes on.
I had my own fun fuckup too. I learned SQL on PostgreSQL, and had to fix a problem with logged data in a MySQL database. Not trusting myself, I typed "BEGIN;" to enter a transaction, ran my update, and queried the table to check my results. I noticed my update did more than I expected, so I entered "ROLLBACK;" only to learn that MyISAM tables don't actually implement transactions.
Thankfully, in this case it turned out to be possible to undo the damage, but talk about a heart-stopping moment!
Shit happens. You deal with it, then do what you can to keep it from happening again. I've learned to respect early morning change windows as a way to limit damage caused by mistakes.
I've seen worse though. A newish officer spilled his morning coffee into the circuitry of a device worth over 10 zeros. Immediately short circuited.
My account's karma and history exceed your account's on this site, and even worse, this individual comment bears more value than yours! Ooh burn!
Let's post-mortem this lunacy:
1) You misinterpret jsmthrowaway's initial comment as vaguely racist (or something), notice the word "throwaway" in his user name and get really excited that you can stand on your high horse and call him out for hiding behind the shield of internet anonymity when he wants to be a (you think) racist idiot. Even though his comment is a legitimate currency conversion remark. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=1+usd+in+yen
2) He explains that clearly you're mistaken (which, really, seriously, what a kneejerk response from someone who just wanted to show how clever they were, calling out an "asshole") and further explains his account isn't even a "throwaway" in the traditional, trolly sense of the word, citing his account age and the fact that he regularly actively posts to the account.
3) You, caught perhaps in a moment of clarity, though I think I give you too much credit here, realize you were too eager to pounce on the "asshole" for his "Yen" remark, and perhaps you misread it. Your latent erection fading, you counter by explaining that your history and karma are even _more_ impressive, somehow completely avoiding taking responsibility for a completely nonsensical leap in logic and accusation of wrongdoing, while doubling down on your cognitive dissonance.
4) The Aristocrats!
Why, yes...a couple of times...before a perspex arch was less-than-hastily fixed over the button..
shit happens, design for the worst.