[jacobsenscott]

Idk about "easily", but I'm sure they were motivated. If you've ever tried to restore parts of a database in a piecemeal fashion, it is usually fairly labor intensive. But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great.

[swiftcoder]

> But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great

On the other hand, you should really, really, really hope that GitHub has internal guardrails to prevent their engineers making cowboy edits to the production databases without manager approval.

[jacobsenscott]

Haven't worked there, but I assume one engineer just needs one other engineer to approve their PR. I would be pretty surprised if it was more robust that that.

[swiftcoder]

I haven't worked at GitHub either, but I did work at AWS, where a change to a production database required filing a detailed CM (change management form) with step-by-step details of the operations to be completed + monitoring criteria + rollback plans. That CM had to be approved by the senior eng staff of all affected teams, plus the full management chain, and in a high-profile issue like this, the PR/comms teams as well.