When you work in production and have quotas to meet, you often ignore interesting side-effects. When I worked at google I worked at global cluster scale and frequently saw any number of events that in themselves would have been graduate-student-for-two-years projects that I had to force myself to ignore so I could get my main work (large scale protein design using 1-3 million cores in prod) to finish.

As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.