If I were Cloudflare it would mean an immediate job offer well above market. That junior engineer is either a genius or so lucky that they must be bred by Pierson’s Puppeteers or such a perfect manifestation of a human fuzzer that their skills must be utilized.

I kind of did that back in the days when they released Worker KV, I tried to bulk upload a lot of data and it brought the whole service down, can confirm I was proud :D

It's also not exactly the least common way that this sort of huge multi-tenant service goes down. It's only as rare as it is because more or less all of them have had such outages in the past and built generic defenses (e.g. automated testing of customer changes, gradual rollout, automatic rollback, there are others but those are the ones that don't require any further explanation).

You might want to consider migrating to Azure Front Door if that's a feature you like: https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/11/azure-afd-control-plane-f...

Well its easy to cause damage by messing up the `rm` command, esp with `-fr` options. So don't take it as a proxy for some great skill which is required to cause damage.

Hmm, wait a minute.. maybe he was the cause! (no, kidding. just upping the pressure as a good peer :)

What do you imagine would be the result if you brought down cloudflare with a legitimate config update (ie not specifically crafted to trigger known bugs) while not even working for them? If I were the customer "responsible" for this outage, I'd just be annoyed that their software is apparently so fragile.

I would be fine if it was my "fault", but I'm sure people in business would find a way to make me suffer.

But on a personal level, this is like ordering something at a restaurant and the cook burning the kitchen because they forgot to take out your pizza out of the oven or something.

I would be telling it to everyone over beers (but not my boss).

Why is it dread? I always feel good when big players mess up, as it makes me feel better about my own mess ups in life previously.

When others cause problems then you can put your feet up and surf the web waiting for resolution. Oh, wait.

This is why you ALWAYS have a proposal ready. I literally had my ass saved by having tickets with reliability/redundancy work clearly laid out with comments by out of touch product/people managers deprioritizing the work after attempts to pull it off the backlog (in one infamous case for a notoriously poorly conceived and expensive failure of a project that haunted us again with lost opportunity cost).

The hilarious part of the whole story is that the same PMs and product managers were (and I cannot overemphasize this enough) absolutely militant orthodox agile practitioners with jira.

Every time a major cloud goes down, management tells us why don't we have a backup service that we can switch to. Then I tell them that a bunch of services worth a lot more than us are also down. Do you really want to spend the insane amount of resources to make sure our service stays up when the global internet is down?

Who decided to go with AWS of CF? If its a management decision tell them you need the resources to have a fallback if they want their system to be more reliable than AWS or CF.

Haha yeah I just got off the phone and I said, look, either this gets fixed soon or there's going to be news headlines with photographs of giant queues of people milling around in airports.

Well, at least something good came out of this incident.

Perfect.

Yup, that works.

it has to sound like a german word though

since schaden is damage and freude is joy, not sure what it should be - maybe Schadeleichtig hmm...

My manager once asked if he could have a "quick word". I said "velocity".

Related situation: you're at a family gathering and everyone has young kids running around. You hear a thump, and then some kid starts screaming. Conversation stops and every parent keenly listens to the screams to try and figure out whose kid just got hurt, then some other parent jumps up - it's not your kid! #phewphoria

You're not alone in this feeling. I occasionally smile when it's not my kid.

This is one of the secret joys of being a parent.

Nah, that's delight in someone else's misfortune. This is delight that the misfortune wasn't yours, which is slightly different.

Not quite, that’s more like taking pleasure in the misfortune of someone else. It’s close, but the specific relief bit that it is not _your_ misfortune is not captured

Guilty until proven innocent.