If a social media platform is running smoothly, but the engineers leave, why can’t a platform continue to run on autopilot?

Question

I guess this is applicable to any social media platform or other similar systems. Is it because there are always bugs to address, so it’s never really running smoothly, or other reasons?

In: 153

Answer 1

A hard drive fills up. That can crash a server. And take down any services that rely on that server.

That’s just one example of a small failure that if left unchecked degrades the system. Enough small failures and you start to have reliability issues across the system. It starts as a few things slowing down or not functioning until cascading failures bring the whole thing down.