This isn't the first time a config system at Google causes a major outage.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/todays-outage-for-se...
That's entirely unsurprising. The recent major Facebook outage was also caused by bad configuration IIRC.
See: http://danluu.com/postmortem-lessons/
> Configuration > > Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause > I’ve seen of really bad outages. When I looked at publicly available > postmortems, searching for “global outage postmortem” returned > about 50% outages caused by configuration changes. Publicly > available postmortems aren’t a representative sample of all > outages, but a random sampling of postmortem databases also > reveals that config changes are responsible for a disproportionate > fraction of extremely bad outages. As with error handling, I’m > often told that it’s obvious that config changes are scary, but > it’s not so obvious that most companies test and stage config > changes like they do code changes.
PS. On HN you should use asterisks to italicize instead of > for quoting.