> From Pham's first email, it seems like there is some question whether that was the case, because the engineer repeatedly acked the pages without resolving any

> From Pham's first email, it seems like there is some question whether that was the case, because the engineer repeatedly acked the pages without resolving any issue: As an employee who has been on-call for production systems for most of his career, this smacks of someone who's never been on-call and is indeed looking for a scapegoat. From the article: > “We are looking to determine whether this is negligence or whether a different on-call engineer could have reasonably missed the alerts amidst a flood of other alerts from the systems at that time.” The key phrase is "flood of other alerts" - to me, this sounds as if other shit was hitting the fan and the engineer rolled the dice on letting this sit while fixing something else that was perceived to be more important. Unfortunately, that seems to have been a bad move. However, it's an eminently understandable move (and indeed, one I've made myself). How much disk is left? What's the rate of change? Can you even know that immediately while still trying to deal with the "flood of other alerts?" This sounds like there's a lot of things went wrong here, but I doubt the engineer was one of them.