Comment by amy214

The issue is how a person looks at it. You could say:

1) the cause was a null pointer, so let's fire that programmer and get a good one in there who doesn't make stupid mistakes.

Or instead taking a different angle and attitude:

2) Every programmer makes null pointer mistakes at some point, we need to treat human workers, though incredibly gifted, as not 100% perfect. Thus this is a failure of our system and our policies to catch a scenario that was inevitable

This type of thinking and parallel applies to any and all high risk situation, least of which is whether google cloud works, but also things like "my airplane crashed" or "the surgeon removed the wrong leg"