That's courageous but this wasn't your mistake, it was the CEO's mistake. They owe you a vacation and apology for putting you in that terrible position!
I'm not sure if it's the CEO's mistake, or any specific individual's mistake for that matter. In this particular case many different problems coalesced, producing one giant problem. If it wasn't me, somebody else would have eventually made the same mistake; perhaps with even greater impact.
Any blame that would be generalized to the company as a whole is also specifically the CEO's fault. The buck has to stop somewhere. That is part of the deal for the big chair/title/paycheck/expense account (at any company, not just Gitlab or in SV).
Exactly. The CEO clearly didn't properly weigh the impact of a failure like this on the reputation of the company. GitLab will lose many customers over this. Unfortunately choices like calling in (or allowing) the original engineer to work on recovery, not protecting the engineer from mistakes of the organization, etc. don't signal recognition of the required corrective action. That corrective action requires the CEO to take full responsibility, protect individual employees from process-driven failure, study the cultural aspects that allowed the failure to occur, etc.
I agree with the CEO being responsible. As I mentioned 15 hours ago in this HN post in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13537245 "the blame is with all of us, starting with me. Not with the person in the arena."
I think you're right that it wasn't a mistake of anyone below the CEO position, but I'm certain that it was a huge mistake on the CEO's part. The customers and employees deserve a huge apology from the CEO. I'll be shocked if without this realization on the leader's part the board doesn't replace them.
