once witnessed a company try to deploy a hot code fix in response to a DDOS attack, only to have their code repository — their only code repository — go down and refuse to come back up.

Scale Fail, part 1 | LWN.net

Scale Fail, part 2 | LWN.net

Really interesting articles on how companies with web applications fail to scale up to high demand. Been waiting for it to stop being subscribers-only for a week or so to post it here.