When Infrastructure Fails: Why the Trolling Has to Stop
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It's always the same: when a provider goes down or hits a rough patch, customers of other providers start trolling instead of sending any love. It's just utterly ridiculous.
AWS experiences an incident? GCP customers troll. OVH runs into problems? Scaleway and others take their shots. Some provider suffers an outage? Customers of the competitors—and even a few employees—show up with open criticism and barbed remarks.
Meanwhile, operations teams are sweating blood at 3 a.m. trying to bring the service back online.
Today I want to talk about this behavior I've been seeing for years in our industry, because honestly, it's time we cut this nonsense out.
The playbook is always the same during an infrastructure incident:
That last point is the problem. On Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack communities, or Discord, I see things like:
Sometimes it's even employees of competitors disguising marketing as “technical advice.”
I've thought about this a lot, and I see several psychological and social factors at play.
I see it everywhere in tech: Linux vs. Windows, Vim vs. Emacs, React vs. Vue... and of course AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure. We pick a side, and that side becomes part of our professional identity.
When “our” technical choice seems validated by problems at a competitor, it reinforces our decision. It's comforting. It's human.
But it's also toxic.
Some people (sometimes even staff) view incidents at competitors as free marketing opportunities. The underlying message becomes, “Switch to us, we're more reliable.”
The problem? It’s counterproductive. The next time their infrastructure stumbles (and it will), they become the target of the same attacks.
It feels like many of the people who troll have never run critical infrastructure at scale. They don't know what it's like to:
It's easy to criticize when you're not in the trenches.
"It will never happen to us." That's what plenty of people think... right up until it does.
The perfect infrastructure doesn’t exist. Every major provider has had (and will have) incidents:
This isn't just about hurt feelings. I see concrete, harmful consequences.
When teams know they'll be publicly trolled, they may be tempted to:
The result? Less transparency, fewer detailed post-mortems, less collective learning.
I'm convinced we're all in the same boat. Ops, SREs, DevOps, platform engineers... we all face the same challenges:
When we troll one another, we tear down the solidarity that should hold us together.
The best post-mortems I've read come from companies unafraid to be transparent about their mistakes. If trolling becomes the norm, we'll see fewer:
And the entire community becomes technically poorer.
For smaller teams or startups, watching how the “big guys” get treated can be terrifying. It can even scare them away from being transparent about their own incidents.
I'm not saying we have to be blindly positive about every provider. You absolutely have the right to:
But there is a time and a place for it. And it is NOT during an active incident.
Put yourself in the shoes of an ops engineer in the middle of an incident. You're under pressure, exhausted, doing everything you can to restore service. Meanwhile, you see people on Twitter or LinkedIn making fun of you, posting memes, using your stress as a marketing pitch.
It's terrible. It's cruel.
Those teams are made up of human beings. People with families, people who sacrificed their night, already under massive pressure. Adding public mockery on top of that is just inhumane.
Want to criticize a provider? Fine. Do it:
But during the incident? The bare minimum of decency is to stay quiet or send support.
I have a few ideas on how we could react better when infrastructure incidents happen. Here's what I do (or try to do) personally.
A simple supportive message can make a world of difference for a team in crisis:
These messages cost nothing, but they show we understand the reality of the job.
Instead of trolling, I'd rather:
It's a chance for collective learning, not division.
I always remind myself:
A little humility never hurts.
When a company publishes a solid, transparent post-mortem, I try to highlight it publicly:
That's how we build a culture of learning.
I'm not naive. I know trolling won't disappear overnight. But I believe we can each do our part.
The next time a provider experiences an incident, I invite you to:
And if you're a customer impacted by the incident, yes, you're allowed to be frustrated. But even then, there's a difference between expressing frustration constructively and slipping into insults or contempt.
Modern infrastructure is complex. Incidents are inevitable. What isn't inevitable is how we react to them.
We can choose trolling, tribalism, and toxicity. Or we can choose empathy, support, and collective learning.
I know which option I'm picking. What about you?
The next time you see a major incident, ask yourself: what do you want to contribute to the community? Noise or support?