Originally Posted by
bennos
As yet another IT person, I've enjoyed reading the conjecture in this thread, especially from a couple of seemingly particularly well-informed posters. The posts I enjoy most, however, (excluding "how can I scam something out of this?") are the ones from posters asserting that in their IT world nothing like this could ever happen. HA, BC, and DR are, like security, about risk reduction not risk elimination. No matter how impressive your system redundancy is, I can find a way (however unlikely) to defeat it.
Yeah, I've been mildly amused by the amount of forthright "this would never happen to me" stated or implied. It does seem likely they or their providers/vendors had large gaps in their continuity plan. But the defects are always easy to identify and pick apart in hindsight, and every business makes tradeoffs.
Sure, this is still a process failure on DL's part, and embarrassing for them, but I do have some degree of sympathy for how it could have happened.