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Your broad point is obviously correct (most outages are caused by code or config changes) but there are still classes of failures that can happen without any real changes, like various performance degradations (maybe your table grows too large) or occasional catastrophic failures from things like disk space or id overflow or something.

There's also the stability of third party systems: forced deprecations, security EOL, etc. The cert expiration stuff people have been mentioning is in this category too. I wouldn't be surprised if something does slip through the cracks at Twitter in the next 4 or 6mo.



A few of us remembers the time Slashdots 24-bit comment table ID keys overflowed, was a fun couple of days.


also: regulatory changes. if you can't function within the law, that's tantamount to a critical bug.




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