For those of you who (you lucky devils) are not programmers or wise to the ways of the online web development world, let me point out a few things that lead me to believe "glitch my ass":

1) At my place of employment, any time we discover a problem in our code updates (and let me tell you, it becomes evident VERY QUICKLY if there's a problem), the first thing we do is PULL THE UPDATE BACK AND RESTORE THE PREVIOUS VERSION. IMMEDIATELY. The fact that Amazon has not done so is curious, to my eyes.

2) The next thing we do is determine what changes were made in that update and who did them. Scapegoats are critical. We've got software that will show us what was changed and where. This doesn't take long.

3) When we have determined who did what where and when, we politely contact that person and ask "why?" As in either "why did your change cause this impact?" or "why in the HELL did you code that change THAT WAY?".

4) We then correct the problem, test like hell five times over and THEN push the updated (and presumably correct) version to the web.

This doesn't take very long, a few hours at most. And if this were in fact a glitch, a rollback to the prior (correct) version doesn't take that long. And if it were a hack (snort), someone had to be able to track their way through millions of lines of code to find that particular section of code and KNOW what to change to achieve the results in question. Not to mention get that hacked code online.

So, again, Glitch My Aunt Fanny. Fess up, Amazon. You're busted but good.

JSM

(Why do companies even think about doing this? Why do anything that, if not discovered, hurts your business and if discovered REALLY hurts your business? I don't understand...)

Tags: #amazonfail