'Typos' don't take down servers

Most press coverage of AWS's recent outage has explained the event as having been caused by a "typo" that one of its engineers made when updating a billing subsystem. The'typo' spin on this story may be the media's way of dramatizing the blunder and making it easy to explain. Certainly, Amazon's own post-mortem noted that "one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly {read'typo'} and a larger set of servers was removed than intended." I believe that Amazon is trying to shift the blame from how they have designed, protected and audited their systems – a systemic process that affects all of their operations – and have instead chosen to portray this as a one-off event that happened just within one small subsystem bcause someone didn't follow the approved playbook. Google's advice to make it hard for errors to happen follows the practice of all leading safety organizations.