I wonder who is to blame for the PayPal outage
October 13, 2004Boy I’d hate being the QA manager at PayPal. I mean who else to blame for the recent outage that lasted for several days. The problems occurred after a new code release was deployed late last week.
Meaning somebody didn’t do thorough-enough performance testing on this release. They wouldn’t be the first–I remember some horrible days on Download.com when we launched a Java-based search system that crumbled under the onslaught. And that code was mostly my fault, though to be fair they had asked an inexperienced Java programmer (me) to implement this using a brand-new set of Java classes that our infrastructure group was still working on. While I was trying to finish the search page implementation.
Crazy. I wonder if something similar happened at PayPal? I blame that sort of issue on management–the pressure to hit deadlines at all costs, without worrying that you have the wrong people implementing the wrong thing using the wrong technology.
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