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Comment by arbuge

7 hours ago

Tell him it's worse than he thinks. He obviously brought the entire Cloudflare system down.

You joke and I think its funny, but as a junior engineer I would be quite proud if some small change I made was able to take down the mighty Cloudflare.

  • If I were Cloudflare it would mean an immediate job offer well above market. That junior engineer is either a genius or so lucky that they must be bred by Pierson’s Puppeteers or such a perfect manifestation of a human fuzzer that their skills must be utilized.

    • This reminds of a friend I had in college. We were assigned to the same group coding an advanced calculator in C. This guy didn't know anything about programming (he was mostly focused on his side biz of selling collector sneakers), so we assigned him to do all the testing, his job was to come up with weird equations and weird but valid way to present them to the calculator. And this dude somehow managed to crash almost all of our iterations except the few last ones. Really put the joke about a programmer, a tester, and a customer walk into a bar into perspective.

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  • I kind of did that back in the days when they released Worker KV, I tried to bulk upload a lot of data and it brought the whole service down, can confirm I was proud :D

  • It's also not exactly the least common way that this sort of huge multi-tenant service goes down. It's only as rare as it is because more or less all of them have had such outages in the past and built generic defenses (e.g. automated testing of customer changes, gradual rollout, automatic rollback, there are others but those are the ones that don't require any further explanation).

  • Well its easy to cause damage by messing up the `rm` command, esp with `-fr` options. So don't take it as a proxy for some great skill which is required to cause damage.

    • You could easily cause great damage to your Cloudflare setup, but CF has measures to prevent random customers deleting stuff from taking down the entire service globally. Unless you have admin access to the entire CF system, you can't really cause much damage with rm.