[disney_ta_2025]

Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.

Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.

What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.

You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.

[leakycap]

I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.

[slg]

In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...

[bdcravens]

As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.

A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.

[leakycap]

AT&T has the worst/buggiest login process I've encountered, and I also have to use Comcast/Xfinity.

Logging in to pay AT&T wireless service sometimes takes half an hour of attempts resulting in any number of weird errors until it just works.

[makeitdouble]

> Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.

This in itself makes the situation intentional.

[JBlue42]

Hulu had some major problems during the broadcast of the Oscars so I was surprised but not surprised to hear about the issues with this.

>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.

Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.

Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.

[MonkeyIsNull]

“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”

[leakycap]

This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.