That's basically what happened with S3 a couple years back. Mistyped command caused an outage for large parts of the internet in the US. Now, I dunno if they could make a big enough mistake that would bring down the whole company, but certainly it's been proven that a single mistake can affect major portions of the internet.

I always find it funny how I'm designing with best practices in mind on top of infrastructure someone out of university build as their first project.

This is not the case with S3 and not the case with that incident.

Pretty sure there are first year grads who have worked on S3 as their first project.

So what? You're saying it as if they gave them root access to the servers and went "go nuts".

Bugs in code happen. You don't need write access to cause irreparable damage when the app you're working on has it.

This applies to everyone, juniors and seniors, and that's why we have code reviews, tests and tooling.

Yeah, that's pretty much what major companies I've worked for will do with summer interns.

I don't know, that hasn't been my experience at all in the companies I've worked for (maybe because there's no way I'd let it happen).

You can't prove me wrong since it's source is not available.

I would believe that AWS is one click away from being unavailable for 12 hours, but not one click away from major irrecoverable data loss.

(Don't ask for a rigorous definition of "one click away", though.)

For most AWS services it would be fairly difficult to cause multi-region damage by mistake.

> experienced code reviewers verifying change sets using sophisticated deployment infrastructure targeting physical hardware spread out across one or more data centers in each availability zone

but the availability numbers speak for themselves :/