March 1, 2017 SEATTLE - Following the massive S3 service outage stemming from a single malformed command line instruction, Amazon announced today its plans to add a simple (Y/n) prompt into its server management utility to check if the engineer using it actually intends to cripple their entire infrastructure. Technical leadership detailed the company’s intended course of action in a press release, and described just how stern the language of the prompt will be to strengthen the barrier between a single keystroke and total annihilation of Amazon’s cloud storage services.

In the press release, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels indicated that they had initially moved towards a prompt reading, “Are you sure you want to reduce S3 to a quivering mass of timeouts and HTTP 500 status codes? (Y/n)”, but instead eventually settled on, “Are you certain you want to take a big steaming dump on the sterling reputation of our service level agreement? (Y/n)”. Amazon was adamant that the engineer who caused the outage had not been fired or reprimanded, but that they had installed a replica Sword of Damocles above their desk chair.

This article was originally published on AlwaysTrending, a fantastic (but archived) satire site by Matt Frisbie. Copied here with permission of the author.