High School Management Method: Blame a Customer

June 9, 2021

I noted another allegedly true anecdote. If the information is correct, gentle reader, we have another example of the high school science club management method. Think acne, no date for the prom, and a weird laugh type of science club. Before you get too excited, yes, I was a member of my high school’s science club and I think an officer as well as a proponent of the HSSC approach to social interaction. Proud am I.

Fastly Claims a Single Customer Responsible for Widespread Internet Outage” asserts:

The company is now claiming the issue stemmed from a bug and one customer’s configuration change. “We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change,” Nick Rockwell, the company’s SVP of engineering and infrastructure wrote in a blog post last night. “This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

Yep, a customer using the Fastly cloud service.

Two observations:

  1. Unnoticed flaws will be found and noticed, maybe exploited. Fragility and vulnerability are engineered in.
  2. Customer service is likely to subject the individual to an inbound call loop. Take that, you valued customer.

And what about Amazon’s bulletproof, super redundant, fail over whiz bang system. Oh, it failed for users.

Yep, high school science club thinking says, “We did not do it.” Yeah.

Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2021

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