Comment by acituan

I sympathize because when I was a junior engineer once I accidentally emptied the test email spool sending the entire company including upper management all sorts of fake test emails accumulated in the past years about hires and fires and whatnot. What is more, a coworker convinced an HR person to play a prank and call me to HR office next day for giggles. Needless to say it was stressful and infuriating at the same time.

Now I know better and if somehow they are reading here, I would advise the person to just chill and don't take any shit than necessary. If you were not one of the few people with root access but somehow still had the capabilities for mass emailing in prod, that is not your problem, it is an organizational problem. For an operation at the size of HBO, anything prod has to be behind sufficient failsafes and a peer reviewed process (except maybe for a very rare "break glass" emergency).

Hope there will be a good, rational postmortem that can cool headedly identify the root causes and create action items for the actual stakeholders. If your shop is worth its salt, there wouldn't be performance evaluation consequences for you. If there is, no worries either, it is time to look for a better place.