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The long-running one at Uber for a while was that someone accidentally pasted a Spotify link into some JSON directly after a bracket or something, causing it to be invalid, and brought down the entire API layer after the deployment failed to detect any errors.

Personally, on my first day of my last job, I was brought on to improve the backend (turns out, only how the non-programmer CEO decided was okay, but that's beside the point). I slow-loris'd production just in the off-chance it was vulnerable, because no way would a site hosted on AWS by a tech lead that claimed he was competent would have a slow-loris-vulnerable setup.

It was indeed vulnerable, and not only did I bring down production, I also (somehow) brought down our own wifi router in the office. Caused a few hours of downtime on a monday.

Learned my lesson that day - even though everyone on the team says soandso is super elite, wait until they show you they are and don't trust that they did anything right.



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