Inside the longest Atlassian outage

People who call for other people's firings in organizations that they have no visibility into are so weird. This post reads like a tech outage's version of cancel culture where trying to find someone to blame and skewer for an injustice is more important than actually determining how much (if any) blame they deserve for it

Also posting a LinkedIn event photos with people's real names and pictures in a top post on HN along with provocative framing like "partying in Vegas" about this outage is pretty shitty. Atlassian is a big company and has a huge engineering and sales department, you have no idea if any of those people at the Vegas event had anything to contribute with the outage response. For example in your link there are literally people talking about some new mobile app their team is launching at the event, I doubt any of those people are involved in the outage response.

No one posting on HN unless they work at Atlassian in a leadership role is in any position to even start assigning blame, call for firings or publicly shaming people (the later of which you shouldn't be doing even if you 100% knew for a fact that they were at fault).

Do better.

I think this document and incident is a decent example of common DR planning failure patterns.

It is explained here that Atlassian runs regular DR planning meetings with the engineers spending time planing out potential scenarios, as well as quarterly tests of backups and tracking findings from them.

So, with those two things happening, I the imagine recovery time objectives of That doesn't even come close to the recovery time we are currently seeing now however. We're coming up on 2 orders of magnitude more than that.

The above doc seems pretty far our of line with what is currently happening.

> If you were charged $123.98 and you said, "hey, I told you where the problem was, why am I being charged a diagnostics and driving fee?" and they corrected it by telling you the whole thing is on the house, is that not good business sense?

No. I'll be happy that I saved on the money, but I won't trust them in the future. They're now "the place that tries to get away with things" in my mental Rolodex. Better to stick with the fee and know their value. (I didn't tell them where the problem was. All I knew was that the clutch wasn't grabbing anymore. I assumed it needed a whole new clutch.)

> Even by your own admission, you would have gladly paid that $123.98 with no issues and you wouldn't have been mad about it. So from a business perspective, if they can provide a service, get paid for it, and the customer has no qualms or issues with the transaction whatsoever, in what way is that hurting the brand or being cynical?

It would have been a fine decision, sure. But in that case that would likely have been the only business I did with them. Not out of spite or anger, but because I'd have no reason to pick them for future business. I would instead ask friends for recommendations, or pick some place closer to my future residences.

But what actually happened was that I was the one steering people to them. I also went out of my way to return to them for brake jobs, simple oil changes, etc. I was a loyal customer, and probably spent or caused others to spend over $5,000 there.

He had absolutely know way of knowing that would result. But if you just treat people right, the way you'd want them to treat you, you build a reputation. It pays back.

I know this story comes off a bit pollyanna. I get it. For a cynical and non-altruistic explanation: when it takes a technician literally 5 minutes to twist an adjustment nut and verify that was all there was to it, stop and think about the bigger opportunity before you robotically mark '1.00' in the "LBR HRS" field on an invoice. Especially if you're operating in a field that's notorious for rip offs.

> I think that's a much more business-wise action to take than to give away your services.

I'm not saying businesses should give away major services. But they should avoid the temptation to nickel-and-dime as well. That's on the other end of the optimization curve. Not good business.

Try Kitemaker, it’s a YComb backed JIRA alternative.

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It’s amazing how much stupid shit we do to keep the legal guys happy while their bosses are busy engaging in tax evasion, graft, bribery, fraud, embezzlement, illegal dumping, sexual harassment, sexual assault, statutory rape, solicitation to commit murder, and my personal favorite and I’m sure yours too: human trafficking.

But sure, we can break all of our users to avoid the possibility of you having to write some legal briefs and us paying a small fine for keeping data 7 days instead of three.