[pavel_lishin]

> Now, there is a lot of skepticism around this article, and you should take it with a huge grain of salt, but the timing is curious, although we do not claim it is true or is somehow connected to the systems' crash.

Good advice.

[more_corn]

I wouldn’t be surprised by a causal relationship. Most people planning layoffs don’t actually know what the laid off people do. When Fisker laid everyone off, their OTA updates went down hard. Had they taken a day to perform a safe shutdown they would have saved months of recovery work. Management likes to lay off with no warning, but for professional infrastructure people that causes more harm than good. Every pro I know will faithfully wrap up the work because they have professional pride.

Layoffs cause loss of institutional knowledge. Minor irritation can balloon into a major outage simply because the person who can fix it easily left the building for the last time.

us-east-1 is the OG region. It has had significant dns problems before. There’s probably a subtle and complicated series of steps for general care and feeding.

Good journalism would identify the process, the owner, cross reference with the layoff list… any of the laid off people would be able to supply those details off the record.