Reminds me of the guy at GitLab, I believe it was, who accidentally and irreversibly deleted a bunch of repositories. GitLab had a fantastic approach to that whole ordeal and public embarrassment. They essentially blamed themselves for not having the proper contingencies in place instead of blaming the individual. It's worth reading up on.
It happened to me and my team like 10 years ago or so: An engineer deleted the production database. We were able to recover it. But the postmortem basically focused on why the he heck did we let that happen. The guy stayed in the company for 8 years more IIRC. We fixed our systemic issue as well.
I've read about blameless postmortems from Medical professionals and I always tell my teams: if those guys (doctors) can do blameless PMs after someone has died, we can do them.
Also reminds me of the Reddit thread [0] where someone accidentally used write access credentials that were on an onboarding document and wiped the production database. GitLab guy actually joined the conversation.
From that link you should also be able to find conversations on Hacker News and the like. It was talked in a lot of places at the time.
If I’m remembering correctly (take this paragraph as imperfect memory), at the time a lot of people on the outside were looking to assign blame but the team tweeted something to the effect of “yes, we know who did it, and no, they won’t be fired” and didn’t even reveal who it was. Then they live-streamed the process of trying to recover as much as they could. They got a ton of community encouragement and it was widely viewed as the right way to handle things.
