4 ms·

I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually

I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.

ethagnawl 1y ago
It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.
- AndyKelley 1y ago
  It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
  - thierrydamiba 1y ago
    Call it HN’s rule: Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
      - arcticbull 1y ago
        COVID years really messed some people up.
        leakycap 1y ago
        You mean like all the people that died? The caretakers in the years after? The medical staff who never got a break? You're right about that.
        arcticbull 1y ago
        My comment was not about COVID.
        leakycap 1y ago
        Your comment was: > COVID years really messed some people up. You seem to think that you said something different than you did. If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot.
        arcticbull 1y ago
        No, what I said was the COVID years. People became dramatically more prone to conspiracy theories and significantly more polarized in the 2020-2025 period. A lot more happened to people than just exposure to COVID, which was of course part of it. I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. There was a meaningful step change in the way we interact with each other and what is acceptable. There was a huge impact to the social fabric and cohesion of society.
        leakycap 1y ago
        Using my eyes, I looked back at the text on my screen next to your username. Your comment was 7 words, one of which is literally "COVID". Then you said you're weren't actually talking about COVID, but you actually meant something about how you think others are now prone to dramatic conspiracy theories. It seems like you're experiencing some of this yourself or are stuck in some sort of race condition where if someone else doesn't agree with you, it's clearly a them issue. They're the conspiricist. While explaining that you intended me to get a whole different message from your initial 7 words, you go on to say that while discussing the "COVID years" that... > I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. Why aren't you focusing on these things? It seems much more important than whatever you are spinning on about the social fabric and cohesion of society as you type into a webform to a stranger about how everyone has conspiracies now.
    - silverquiet 1y ago
      I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor." It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
      - trained6446 1y ago
        Incompetence, filtered by customers biased to complain when cheated, and ignore mistakes in their favour?
      - ipaddr 1y ago
        If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral. His father's theory didn't take into account this.
    - lovelearning 1y ago
      The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record. Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined. The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this: > The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless. No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless." We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/ https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/
      - Ferret7446 1y ago
        That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions. Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
    - 8note 1y ago
      my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
    - danaris 1y ago
      Hanlon's Razor is for a situation where good faith can be assumed, or the benefit of the doubt given. When the actors involved have shown themselves to be self-interested, bad-faith, or otherwise undeserving of the benefit of the doubt, it can be abandoned, and malice assumed where it has been clearly present before.
  - gruez 1y ago
    Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
    - AndyKelley 1y ago
      Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
      - ndkap 1y ago
        This administration is not going to apply said regulations, especially when the said regulations us punishing what they are favoring
  - da_chicken 1y ago
    That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site. And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
  - zitterbewegung 1y ago
    You see this in video games. Game breaking bugs ? Next week. People can’t buy or use a skin(s) for a weapon? Less than 24 hr fix .
- nerdponx 1y ago
  I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.
  - someguyiguess 1y ago
    I have to agree. When money is involved I defer to Occam’s Razor.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dawnerd 1y ago
Anyone that’s used any of Disneys sites know they break at random on a good day. Just look how many people complain about the DCL site having issues.
Terr_ 1y ago
I considered that, but there's a very real risk that the bad-press of it crashing will have an even bigger financial effect.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever. I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Look at Target’s yearly chart. Then look at Walmart’s to see where it should have been.
    - autoexec 1y ago
      Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott. It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        Targets CEO of 11 years is currently being forced out. Yeah, I’d say the shareholders are pissed when the stock is literally -40% on the year while other companies in this sector are doing the opposite. Their stock is one of the worst performing in the sp500 this year. Long term outlook is worse by the day.
blindriver 1y ago
Load shedding
is_true 1y ago
I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.
arduanika 1y ago
A good webpage should not crash upon mouse over.
- thrill 1y ago
  Bravo sir, bravo.
disney_ta_2025 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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...
- MonkeyIsNull 1y ago
  “Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”
  - leakycap 1y ago
    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.
adrr 1y ago
It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.
rdtsc 1y ago
> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later. They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.
ajkjk 1y ago
this is probably the case, not sarcastically
duxup 1y ago
A website or service unable to handle traffic is still a thing in this day and age.

I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.

ethagnawl 1y ago

It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.

AndyKelley 1y ago
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
- thierrydamiba 1y ago
  Call it HN’s rule: Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
    - arcticbull 1y ago
      COVID years really messed some people up.
      - leakycap 1y ago
        You mean like all the people that died? The caretakers in the years after? The medical staff who never got a break? You're right about that.
        arcticbull 1y ago
        My comment was not about COVID.
        leakycap 1y ago
        Your comment was: > COVID years really messed some people up. You seem to think that you said something different than you did. If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot.
        arcticbull 1y ago
        No, what I said was the COVID years. People became dramatically more prone to conspiracy theories and significantly more polarized in the 2020-2025 period. A lot more happened to people than just exposure to COVID, which was of course part of it. I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. There was a meaningful step change in the way we interact with each other and what is acceptable. There was a huge impact to the social fabric and cohesion of society.
        leakycap 1y ago
        Using my eyes, I looked back at the text on my screen next to your username. Your comment was 7 words, one of which is literally "COVID". Then you said you're weren't actually talking about COVID, but you actually meant something about how you think others are now prone to dramatic conspiracy theories. It seems like you're experiencing some of this yourself or are stuck in some sort of race condition where if someone else doesn't agree with you, it's clearly a them issue. They're the conspiricist. While explaining that you intended me to get a whole different message from your initial 7 words, you go on to say that while discussing the "COVID years" that... > I'm not talking about the people who died or the healthcare workers. Why aren't you focusing on these things? It seems much more important than whatever you are spinning on about the social fabric and cohesion of society as you type into a webform to a stranger about how everyone has conspiracies now.
  - silverquiet 1y ago
    I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor." It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
    - trained6446 1y ago
      Incompetence, filtered by customers biased to complain when cheated, and ignore mistakes in their favour?
    - ipaddr 1y ago
      If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral. His father's theory didn't take into account this.
  - lovelearning 1y ago
    The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record. Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined. The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this: > The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless. No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless." We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/ https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/
    - Ferret7446 1y ago
      That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions. Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
  - 8note 1y ago
    my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
  - danaris 1y ago
    Hanlon's Razor is for a situation where good faith can be assumed, or the benefit of the doubt given. When the actors involved have shown themselves to be self-interested, bad-faith, or otherwise undeserving of the benefit of the doubt, it can be abandoned, and malice assumed where it has been clearly present before.
- gruez 1y ago
  Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
  - AndyKelley 1y ago
    Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
    - ndkap 1y ago
      This administration is not going to apply said regulations, especially when the said regulations us punishing what they are favoring
- da_chicken 1y ago
  That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site. And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
- zitterbewegung 1y ago
  You see this in video games. Game breaking bugs ? Next week. People can’t buy or use a skin(s) for a weapon? Less than 24 hr fix .
nerdponx 1y ago
I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.
- someguyiguess 1y ago
  I have to agree. When money is involved I defer to Occam’s Razor.
vlovich123 1y ago
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dawnerd 1y ago

Anyone that’s used any of Disneys sites know they break at random on a good day. Just look how many people complain about the DCL site having issues.

Terr_ 1y ago

I considered that, but there's a very real risk that the bad-press of it crashing will have an even bigger financial effect.

SoftTalker 1y ago
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever. I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Look at Target’s yearly chart. Then look at Walmart’s to see where it should have been.
  - autoexec 1y ago
    Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott. It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Targets CEO of 11 years is currently being forced out. Yeah, I’d say the shareholders are pissed when the stock is literally -40% on the year while other companies in this sector are doing the opposite. Their stock is one of the worst performing in the sp500 this year. Long term outlook is worse by the day.

blindriver 1y ago

Load shedding

is_true 1y ago

I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.

arduanika 1y ago

A good webpage should not crash upon mouse over.

thrill 1y ago
Bravo sir, bravo.

disney_ta_2025 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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...
MonkeyIsNull 1y ago
“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”
- leakycap 1y ago
  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.

adrr 1y ago

It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.

rdtsc 1y ago

> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later. They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.

ajkjk 1y ago

this is probably the case, not sarcastically

duxup 1y ago

A website or service unable to handle traffic is still a thing in this day and age.