I doubt anyone will publish a good post mortem. I agree somebody is responsible for such a high profile failure, but I’m sure that the wrong person will be chos

I doubt anyone will publish a good post mortem. I agree somebody is responsible for such a high profile failure, but I’m sure that the wrong person will be chosen as the scapegoat. The app itself doesn’t sound like it needed to be that complex, and by all accounts, it wasn’t. But it feels like the company believed that the secret to a successful rollout was to ask the developer beforehand “are you sure there won’t be any problems?” Every time I’ve been involved in releasing a web service, the step before “tell the world that the software is live” has been “make one or more complete end-to-end requests to make sure everything is running correctly.” The company clearly skipped that step: they announced the project was live without first making a single end-to-end request. We know that because the problems people reported and the problems that the company has described would have made it impossible for any upload to succeed.