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Rogue code led to Gmail shutdown (ft.com)
17 points by sevib on March 2, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



> “That’s just not acceptable,” said Matt Cain, an analyst at Gartner, the IT consultants. “It was poor thinking-through of a code change. In a corporate environment, you can’t just tell your CEO it was bad luck.”

And that's the sad part. In a corporate environment, you need to go tell your CEO that it was your subordinates fault, for being incompetent, that your $1 mio e-mail infrastructure went belly-up for a whole day, and it took three man-weeks in overtime to fix it, and that the subordinate was fired, and that you're going to spend $5k hiring a new guy, who's probably less qualified.

On the other hand, to say that the corporations zero-maintenance $50/year Google accounts was down for an hour, and it was bad luck, is just plain unacceptable. That's obvious.


Someone who knows Richard Waters should suggest he looks up "rogue" in the dictionary. One would think from the title that it was nefarious code instead of simply faulty code. That might lead you to believe it was a sensationalistic title designed to pull eyeballs to an article that is simple regurgitation of the previously reported facts.


Yes, the title is what ft.com used, so sevib didn't do anything wrong, but it's still link baiting since it's completely wrong (i.e. ft.com is confused), so flagged.




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