Production Deployment Without Proper Testing Pipeline

You deploy. Something breaks. And there's no plan B. Use blue-green or canary deployments. Automate rollbacks on failure. Always have a rollback.sh or previous image ready.

Incomplete testing. Why it happens: Changes are pushed to production without verifying how HTTPS behaves across browsers, regions, or network types.

Deployments get unavoidably riskier in ways that are super difficult to test because testing distributed systems is really hard.

Why do they do non-critical changes in production before testing in a stage environment?

Differences between development, testing, and production environments can cause unexpected issues in the CI/CD pipeline, resulting in bugs or failed deployments.

Why were they making CDN changes in prod? With their 100M funding recently they could afford a separate env to test CDN changes. Did their engineering team even properly understand surrogate keys to feel confident to roll out a change in prod?

The second incident occurred on May 19, 2025, at 13:17 UTC, triggered by reverting the previous fixes. Configuration regressions were introduced during incident remediation.

Buggy products that require post-release patches/fixes... post release work on patches and fixes (extra work for developers) is becoming more and more common across all sectors.

No apparent dev/test/staging pipeline: Changes deployed directly to production. File access broke for ALL users simultaneously (suggests no canary deployment). No rollback capability: Issues persist for weeks during 'investigation'