[morningsam]

>The upside seems to be some mythical infinite scalability which will collapse under such positive feedback loops.

Unless I misunderstand something here, they say pretty early in the article that they didn't have autoscaling configured for the service in question and there is no indication they scaled up the number of replicas manually after the downtime to account for the accumulated backlog of requests. So, in my mind, of course there can be no infinite, or really any, scalability if the service isn't allowed to scale...

[vrosas]

I’ve seen monumental engineering effort go into managing systems because for one reason or another people refused to use (or properly configure) autoscaling.