HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues

Kevin Fang
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2023–2024 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Shared as a funny, accurate retelling of a classic outage, especially on a bad ops day.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

“The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day.” (HN, 2024)

1 recommendations · 2 citations · 1 jokes · Comedy

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@xyst Aug 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Gitlab is reportedly up for sale
Every time GL is mentioned, I am reminded of the 2017 incident where a person 'rm -rf' the primary pg data logs. The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day. [this video] It’s a shame they are selling out, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. GH is vacuuming up all of the market share. I kind of liked the ability to self host my own GL. But for small/personal use cases. It was a bit overkill.
Comedic reenactment of the 2017 GitLab incident

Citations, criticism and jokes

@sovietmudkipz Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Gitlab.com is down
Here is a retelling of the time when gitlab went down because someone deleted a production database: "Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues" [this video]
Retelling of GitLab's production database deletion
@laserDinosaur Sep 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Nginx Unit – Universal web app server
"When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." Which sounds good in theory, until you run into issues like this: [this video] TLDW: Most of the Gitlabs outage where they deleted the primary prod and backup prod database could have been solved if they just waited for the command line op to complete - but because of a lack of feedback they thought it had frozen, leading to several other plans which made the situation worse.
Lack of CLI feedback worsened the GitLab outage
@renegade-otter Apr 2024 Makes a joke
on HN thread ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down
If the primary fails, will the replica fail over? How do you know? Are the backups working? Who's checking? Can anyone delete a directory when tired at 6PM on a Friday? [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close