Didn't see this when I posted my comment. So there is a team monitoring not a single person?
That's an assumption on your part. Many negative events happen because of assumptions people make and things they take for granted. I ask a valid question. Do you know for a fact how many people monitor their network or what systems they have in place? Or whether they even simulate events like this to see if other members of the team are even reachable? Have you ever seen the constant testing that goes on at large organizations (such as the military) to make sure battle systems are ready to deploy when necessary?
Note also that cloudflare charges $3000 per month for enterprise plans (in addition to free) and that their own website was taken offline.
Many businesses call roles a "team," even when it's just one person. I believe this is the case here, since the linked CloudFlare blog post states:
> Someone from our operations team is monitoring our network 24/7.
"Someone from our operations team is monitoring our network 24/7."
"Someone" seems to indicate "1 person". Not "people are monitoring" but "someone". That's it, one person monitors the network? Like the single night guard at the warehouse?
And my use of "not impressive" was in reply to someone who said "impressive" but more importantly thought it was "impressive" that they put up a post mortem within hours. That's nice but it doesn't answer the question that I had.
I stand behind my comment and re ask the question (since the info is ambiguous we have jgramhmc saying "small team who monitor things" and we have the blog post saying "Someone from our operations team is monitoring our network 24/7."
I don't think it's unreasonable (in the interest of transparency) to know exactly the structure and # bodies of who monitors the network at any given time. What is the human point of failure in the system?
I don't depend on cloudflare. But if I was running a mission critical operation and depended on them I might setup a site visit to actually get a feel of what is going on.
As an aside back when the .org registry got started one of the dns servers sat in an open unguarded office under a desk accessible by the cleaning person. I saw it when I did a site visit. And of course if you've been around long enough you know there was a time when the root dns servers sat unguarded in university offices.
It seems that you care more about how many people are actively waiting for something to break vs. how long their response takes. Also, (those people | that person) probably (is | are) the first responder. I really believe that one "first mate" watching the automated ship sail at night ready to triage a technical problem is better than 10 guards who will promptly fall all over themselves when the bits hit the fan.
Paying 5 people to be up all night staring at dashboards isn't generally (required|a good use of people).
(And I don't agree with that anyway a night guard can call 911 and get the police pretty quick.)
The issue is whether there is a single person monitoring the network or several or even two. And is the coverage different during "working" hours? And what about the skills of the person monitoring at 1am vs. during the day?
Seems that after something happens people wise up to the weak points. Remembering the case of a single air traffic controller in some towers and after something went wrong there was such shock that only one person was on duty with no backup.