One element in the chain of events that led to the database crash raises eyebrows; an attempted hard-delete of the user account of a GitLab employee who had been maliciously flagged for abuse by a troll. It boggles the mind that a system would do such a thing without any human intervention. That’s either a serious coding error or some dangerously naive requirements analysis.

And this is especially damning.

Why was the backup procedure not tested on a regular basis? – Because there was no ownership, as a result nobody was responsible for testing this procedure.

When some important part of a complex system hasn’t been tested thorougly enough, it’s easy to blame the testers. But the blame usually lies higher up the project management chain.