4 ms·

The BBC title is a terrible title. The customer didn’t cause the outage. The bug caused the outage.

underscore_ku 5y ago
this and the BBC bots that upvote every BBC news
mypastself 5y ago
Unless it’s been changed since your comment, I don’t think that’s what the title is claiming. A trigger is different from a cause.
Zenst 5y ago
That was my take as well and very much disenfranchises what happens with title's like that. If you have a design flaw, you don't hint at onus upon the first person to fall foul of it - and we all know how quick many are reading news that they will run fully upon the title alone (something we can all do). But we have seen a drive towards click-bait/search-bot friendly to garner hits - style headlines. Even the BBC over the years have IMHO learnt towards such tabloid style headlines more and that is just sad.
tantalor 5y ago
The bug is the root cause, the customer's action is the proximal cause (or "trigger")
- hnbad 5y ago
  Placing the emphasis on "one customer" still creates a false narrative though. Note the headline doesn't even say it was a bug. This headline provokes the question "Who was it and what did they do?" rather than the more insightful "What was the bug?". If a single bug caused the "internet meltdown", it's fairly likely that the bug was triggered by one person so there's no need to emphasize that part.
  - tantalor 5y ago
    Who cares about headlines? Headlines are written by editors, not reporters, to maximize CTR and minimize length. You can't fit detail and nuance in a headline. The point is to get people to read the article, not inform. If people are drawing conclusions from reading just the headline, not the article, then you can safely ignore them. There's no point in getting mad about it.
  - sporkland 5y ago
    Maybe working at a service provider has warped my English, but usually for me reading "one customer took down X" is usually a pejorative about the service and not a customer witch hunt for me.
  - shitgoose 5y ago
    Well, it is BBC, what do you want.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    This is like saying "Fat man destroys bridge" no, the engineers/builders who didn't implement proper safety tolerance broke the bridge. The straw is not responsible for breaking the camels back.
    - noAnswer 5y ago
      I'm sorry, but that is BS. If a heavy haulage drives over a bridge and it collapses, the first headline will be "Heavy truck destroys bridge". And that is fine. (Subsequent investigations reveal the real reason and will have different headlines. How about the engineers did their part but maintenance didn't. Or routing selected a route that wasn't suitable to begin with. Doesn't change the fact that the bridge collapsed as a heavy truck drove over it.) Why should the BBC talk about a bug in the headline if the source says "valid customer configuration"? They don't write for industries insiders. (Plus that industries is shit to begin with and tries to establish bugs as some kind of force of nature no one can do anything about.)
  - polynomial 5y ago
    Presumably this leads to narratives with higher engagement. The market for technical root cause analysis amongst BBC readership is likely fairly low, so getting into the technicals is not going to sell clicks. Humanizing the problem OTOH is (presumably) a narrative that resonates with their audience. Who was this guy? What was he doing? How does he feel about bringing down the Internet? (Is he sorry?) Is he anything like me? Could I accidentally bring down the entire Internet? Should I be worried about that? etc etc. Not saying modern mass media has no room for technical truth, but I would argue their business model demonstrates over and over again it's this other meta-narrative they're tilting at.
justin_oaks 5y ago
Sadly, most news headlines are terrible. When I read the headline, I clicked through for the details. Fortunately the details made the whole thing clear. I too wish for a world where headlines aren't terrible, but we currently live in a world of clickbait.

this and the BBC bots that upvote every BBC news

Unless it’s been changed since your comment, I don’t think that’s what the title is claiming. A trigger is different from a cause.

Zenst 5y ago

That was my take as well and very much disenfranchises what happens with title's like that. If you have a design flaw, you don't hint at onus upon the first person to fall foul of it - and we all know how quick many are reading news that they will run fully upon the title alone (something we can all do). But we have seen a drive towards click-bait/search-bot friendly to garner hits - style headlines. Even the BBC over the years have IMHO learnt towards such tabloid style headlines more and that is just sad.

tantalor 5y ago

The bug is the root cause, the customer's action is the proximal cause (or "trigger")

hnbad 5y ago
Placing the emphasis on "one customer" still creates a false narrative though. Note the headline doesn't even say it was a bug. This headline provokes the question "Who was it and what did they do?" rather than the more insightful "What was the bug?". If a single bug caused the "internet meltdown", it's fairly likely that the bug was triggered by one person so there's no need to emphasize that part.
- tantalor 5y ago
  Who cares about headlines? Headlines are written by editors, not reporters, to maximize CTR and minimize length. You can't fit detail and nuance in a headline. The point is to get people to read the article, not inform. If people are drawing conclusions from reading just the headline, not the article, then you can safely ignore them. There's no point in getting mad about it.
- sporkland 5y ago
  Maybe working at a service provider has warped my English, but usually for me reading "one customer took down X" is usually a pejorative about the service and not a customer witch hunt for me.
- shitgoose 5y ago
  Well, it is BBC, what do you want.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  This is like saying "Fat man destroys bridge" no, the engineers/builders who didn't implement proper safety tolerance broke the bridge. The straw is not responsible for breaking the camels back.
  - noAnswer 5y ago
    I'm sorry, but that is BS. If a heavy haulage drives over a bridge and it collapses, the first headline will be "Heavy truck destroys bridge". And that is fine. (Subsequent investigations reveal the real reason and will have different headlines. How about the engineers did their part but maintenance didn't. Or routing selected a route that wasn't suitable to begin with. Doesn't change the fact that the bridge collapsed as a heavy truck drove over it.) Why should the BBC talk about a bug in the headline if the source says "valid customer configuration"? They don't write for industries insiders. (Plus that industries is shit to begin with and tries to establish bugs as some kind of force of nature no one can do anything about.)
- polynomial 5y ago
  Presumably this leads to narratives with higher engagement. The market for technical root cause analysis amongst BBC readership is likely fairly low, so getting into the technicals is not going to sell clicks. Humanizing the problem OTOH is (presumably) a narrative that resonates with their audience. Who was this guy? What was he doing? How does he feel about bringing down the Internet? (Is he sorry?) Is he anything like me? Could I accidentally bring down the entire Internet? Should I be worried about that? etc etc. Not saying modern mass media has no room for technical truth, but I would argue their business model demonstrates over and over again it's this other meta-narrative they're tilting at.

justin_oaks 5y ago

Sadly, most news headlines are terrible. When I read the headline, I clicked through for the details. Fortunately the details made the whole thing clear. I too wish for a world where headlines aren't terrible, but we currently live in a world of clickbait.