Hacker Noon - The Ring of Failure

The Ring of Failure

Generally speaking, failure is just embarrassing.

But what if your failures resulted in profound havoc at banks, airlines, and companies, creating billions of dollars worth of damage as well as devastating disruption?

Chills.

A wise person learns from the mistakes of others. So let’s accumulate some wisdom and go over the biggest failures in the history of software.

Ya, boo

Yahoo has had a notable history of both data breaches and hacker attacks.

In December 2014, Yahoo's security team reported that hackers had obtained the credentials of at least 500 million Yahoo accounts. The hack took place in 2014 but has only been made public in 2016.
Thankfully, sensitive financial data like bank accounts and passwords were left uncorrupted.

The question remains: Why did it take so long to confirm the hack and its scale?

Facebook Takes a 'Napp'

In 2019, Facebook suffered a severe outage that tampered with the Facebook family of apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

The company was back on track after 24 hours and blamed the issue on ‘routine maintenance.’

As Facebook reports, it was a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues.

Now let’s imagine the magnitude of frustration when business owners couldn’t access their digital Holy Grail.

Glitch Airways

In November 2019, a computer glitch left thousands of British Airways passengers stuck on the ground for a maximum of 24 hours. The delays and further cancellations had been caused by what the airline describes as a "technical issue".

But that was not an isolated incident. In August of the same year, another IT glitch caused the cancellation of more than 100 flights and torpedoed the plans of 35,000 passengers into disarray.

Oh, talk about chaos.

Github et tu?

Yep, even super techies are not invincible.

On January 31st, 2017, GitHub suffered a major backup restoration failure for one of its products: The online service GitLab.com.

The failure was the result of accidental data removal from their primary database server. The aggravating factor was that the backups had not been made for a while due to a configuration error.

As a result, the company lost some production data including modifications to database data such as projects, comments, user accounts, and others. A total of 300 GB of customer data was lost.

Amazin' Outage

Thousands of online services store their data in the data centers of AWS.

This means that even a small tech glitch can take down Netflix, Slack, Airbnb, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, and even NASA.

Hence, many of them were impacted during a prolonged AWS outage that took place in November 2020.

The company states that this incident occurred after a "small addition of capacity" to its front-end fleet of Kinesis servers. 

Have a Plan

You can’t get away from phishing attacks or ransomware.

But you can at least mitigate the risks by rolling back your product or feature in the case of an embarrassing emergency.

Feature flags will help you safely test features in production and control each individual’s experience with user segmentation.

Join us today to thank our newsletter sponsor, LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly is the #1 platform for managing Feature Flags. Feature Flagging is the smart way to develop and release your code. Visit LaunchDarkly to avoid your own ring of failure.
Check out HackerNoon Special Offers for Startups. Limited time only!
Copyright © 2021 Hacker Noon. All rights reserved.

Hacker Noon

PO Box 2206 Edwards, Colorado,

Unsubscribe

Older messages

Code to the Future

Thursday, August 26, 2021

How can you make sure that your avant-garde idea pans out? Why Continuous Deployment Automation? Code to the Future Global events of 2020 have created an environment where companies are adopting coding

How to Build SpaceX’s Starship

Monday, August 16, 2021

If Elon Musk's space company establishes a Mars colony, and you have a girlfriend on Mars, but later break up because of long distance, she'll be your...Space ex. Project Management for

Lights, Camera, Blockbuster

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Whether it's Iron Man, Star Wars, or Fight Club, the technical know-how for film creation is complex and fascinating. Read on to find out the unbelievable behind-the-scenes processes. Project

Just Launched: Startups of the Year 🚀

Monday, July 26, 2021

4.5k+ Cities; 37k+ Startups: Who'll Achieve Startup of the Year Status in Your City? Vote for 2021's Startups of the Year with Hacker Noon! How's it hanging, Hacker? 👋 Hacker Noon just

iPaaS on the SaaS

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Cloud computing is no longer a joking matter. A simultaneous low-code and code iPaaS iPaaS on the SaaS Cloud computing is no longer a joking matter. This technology is redefining the way companies

You Might Also Like

From Request to Response: How APIs Work – Beginners Guide

Thursday, March 28, 2024

In the vast expanse of the digital ecosystem, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) act as critical conduits, facilitating seamless conversations between different software platforms. From clicking

Elastic 8.13 is here: Amazon Bedrock in the AI Assistant for Observability

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Learn about Amazon Bedrock support within the Elastic AI Assistant for Observability ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ elastic | Search. Observe. Protect

A Creative Market Reset 🎨

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Adobe needed some real competition. Now it has some. Here's a version for your browser. Hunting for the end of the long tail • March 27, 2024 A Creative Market Reset Canva's purchase of

Fisker lost millions … then it got them back

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

More Fisker woes View this email online in your browser By Christine Hall Wednesday, March 27, 2024 Welcome back to TechCrunch PM! This afternoon, learn about some new Google features, a startup that

▶️ How to Get Better YouTube Video Recommendations — What to Know About Alexa Skills

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Also: The Best Samsung Phones of 2024, and More! How-To Geek Logo March 27, 2024 📩 Get expert reviews, the hottest deals, how-to's, breaking news, and more delivered directly to your inbox by

JSK Daily for Mar 27, 2024

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

JSK Daily for Mar 27, 2024 View this email in your browser A community curated daily e-mail of JavaScript news Bad Abstractions Could Be Ruining Your Code The code is easy to read and it runs fine -

Ranked | The World's Biggest Oil Producers in 2023 🛢️

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The word's three biggest oil producers accounted for 40% of production in 2023. View this graphic to learn more. View Online | Subscribe Presented by FEATURED STORY The World's Biggest Oil

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1394 [Easy]

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Daily Coding Problem Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today. This problem was asked by Google. Given the head of a singly linked list, reverse it in-place. Upgrade to premium

Free Event: Watch 10 entrepreneurs launch their AI ideas

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

They built this in 2 months 👀 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Digging into Marissa Mayer’s newest app

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Plus a snake robot on Saturn's moon View this email online in your browser By Alex Wilhelm Wednesday, March 27, 2024 Welcome to TechCrunch AM! Today we have notes on Marissa Mayer's new app,