| ▲ | SerCe 4 hours ago |
| As always, kudos for releasing a post mortem in less than 24 hours after the outage, very few tech organisations are capable of doing this. |
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| ▲ | yen223 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm curious about how their internal policies work such that they are allowed to publish a post mortem this quickly, and with this much transparency. Any other large-ish company, there would be layers of "stakeholders" that will slow this process down. They will almost always never allow code to be published. |
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| ▲ | eastdakota 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well… we have a culture of transparency we take seriously. I spent 3 years in law school that many times over my career have seemed like wastes but days like today prove useful. I was in the triage video bridge call nearly the whole time. Spent some time after we got things under control talking to customers. Then went home. I’m currently in Lisbon at our EUHQ. I texted John Graham-Cumming, our former CTO and current Board member whose clarity of writing I’ve always admired. He came over. Brought his son (“to show that work isn’t always fun”). Our Chief Legal Officer (Doug) happened to be in town. He came over too. The team had put together a technical doc with all the details. A tick-tock of what had happened and when. I locked myself on a balcony and started writing the intro and conclusion in my trusty BBEdit text editor. John started working on the technical middle. Doug provided edits here and there on places we weren’t clear. At some point John ordered sushi but from a place with limited delivery selection options, and I’m allergic to shellfish, so I ordered a burrito. The team continued to flesh out what happened. As we’d write we’d discover questions: how could a database permission change impact query results? Why were we making a permission change in the first place? We asked in the Google Doc. Answers came back. A few hours ago we declared it done. I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate. I sent a draft to Michelle, who’s in SF. The technical teams gave it a once over. Our social media team staged it to our blog. I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did. That was the process. | | |
| ▲ | jofzar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did Damn corporate karma farming is ruthless, only a couple minute SLA before taking ownership of the karma. I guess I'm not built for this big business SLA. | |
| ▲ | philipgross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You call this transparency, but fail to answer the most important questions: what was in the burrito? Was it good? Would you recommend? | | |
| ▲ | eastdakota 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Chicken burrito from Coyo Taco in Lisbon. I am not proud of this. It’s worse than ordering from Chipotle. But there are no Chipotle’s in Lisbon… yet. |
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| ▲ | anurag 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Appreciate the extra transparency on the process. |
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| ▲ | tom1337 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean the CEO posted the post-mortem so there aren't that many layers of stakeholders above. For other post-mortems by engineers, Matthew once said that the engineering team is running the blog and that he wouldn't event know how to veto even if he wanted [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588305 | |
| ▲ | thesh4d0w 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The person who posted both this blog article and the hacker news post, is Matthew Prince, one of highly technical billionaire founders of cloudflare. I'm sure if he wants something to happen, it happens. | |
| ▲ | madeofpalk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | From what I've observed, it depends on whether you're an "engineering company" or not. |
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| ▲ | bayesnet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And a well-written one at that. Compared to the AWS port-mortem this could be literature. |
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| ▲ | philipwhiuk 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Except it fails to document anything about the actions they made to Warp in London during the resolution. | |
| ▲ | hn-idiots 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | tclancy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel like your username really brings something extra to the party. Now go home. | | |
| ▲ | eastdakota 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can attest: not a single LLM used. Couldn’t if I tried. Old school. And not entirely proud of that. | | |
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| ▲ | SilverElfin 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’m surprised by how quickly they put together a post mortem, let alone how quickly they were willing to publish it to the world. Meanwhile, on X, white nationalist supremacists / Groypers / America First America Only types are spreading a conspiracy theory that Cloudflare’s outage was caused by having too many Indians employees and H1Bs. Example: https://x.com/DiggingInTheDi1/status/1990850310202667380 This is far from the only one such post, but what’s amusing / horrifying is that this belief is getting millions of likes across all these posts. |
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| ▲ | mh- 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Why give this sort of content more visibility/reach? I'm sure that's not your intent, so I hope my comment gives you an opportunity to reflect on the effects of syndicating such stupidity, no matter what platform it comes from. | | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin a minute ago | parent [-] | | Mainly to make others aware of what’s happening in the context of this Cloudflare outage. Sure I can avoid giving it visibility/reach but it’s growing and proliferating on its own, and I think ignoring it isn’t going to stop it so I am going awareness will help. I’ve noticed a huge rise in open racism against Chinese and Indian and workers of other origin, even when they’re here on a legal visa that we have chosen to grant. The legislation that MTG just proposed a few days ago to ban H1B entirely, and the calls to ban other visa types, is going to have a big negative impact on the tech industry and American innovation in general. The social media stupidity is online but it gives momentum to the actual real life legislation and other actions the administration might take. |
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