Not me personally, but one of my career mentor’s friend’s took down the entirety of Google Ads as an intern for like 10 minutes. Apparently it was a multi-million dollar mistake, but they fixed the issue so it couldn’t happen again and all was well afterward.
If an intern (or damn near any employee) can be in a position to single handedly take down that scale of system it’s not the intern that should be fired - it’s the architect that baked that kind of weakness in the first place.
In my first couple months, I broke Amazon so that no-one in Europe could buy video for a few hours. On a Friday, right before going on a week’s vacation.
The way that the ensuing investigation and response was carried out - 100% blame-free, and focused on “how did these tools let him down? How can we make sure no-one ever makes that same mistake again?” - gave me a career-long interest in Software Resiliency and Incident Management.
You’re not a real SRE until you’ve caused at least a $100K outage. You’re not a good SRE until you’ve fixed it so nobody can ever make that particular one again.
