In my experience, most really great developers have made similar mistakes at some point in their pasts. Often these mistakes are what catalyze growth and create

In my experience, most really great developers have made similar mistakes at some point in their pasts. Often these mistakes are what catalyze growth and create the scar tissue that helps them (and organizations) to not repeat the same classes of mistakes. You don't fire people when they make mistakes like these, you ask them what they will do to make sure that nobody in the organization is likely to make a similar one. Seems like that is generally Amazon's reaction too. That said, I understand it's pretty damn frustrating having downtime during peak periods :)