I Lost 3 Days Of Data By Not Taking 10 Min. For These Deprecation Steps

In March 2024 nearly 3 billion humans, almost half the planet, went through collective information withdrawal as Facebook and Instagram crashed. Facebook’s downtime wasn’t as cinematic as other apps, like Reddit, which have gone completely offline. By still supporting a sign in flow, Facebook teased users into thinking the app was functional and everything was normal. Consequently, users were trapped in a vicious log- in cycle that inevitably resulted in an error message.

Since I don’t work at Meta/Facebook/Instagram, I can only imagine the chaos and speed at which engineers worked to bring Earth’s social network back online before the lunch rush. I can tell you, however, what it feels like to have all your systems at 100%, only to have visibility plunge to 0.

Given a corporation’s resources, robust dev ops teams and increased reliance on cloud infrastructure, it’s highly unlikely anything like this could happen at my work.

Which it didn’t.

My experience stems from a logistic mistake in my personal infrastructure that compelled me to pull the plug on several automated processes 10 minutes before they were scheduled to kick off their daily runs.

In stepping through my triage and contingency process, I hope you can see, on a much smaller and less stressful scale, the flexibility required to address a data outage and, to a lesser extent, steps needed to deprecate or “sunset” little-used or problematic pipelines.

Build Your Pipeline To A Data Engineering Career

You’ve reached the limit of the public preview. The full version of this post includes the implementation details: The code, the edge cases, and the "why" behind the architecture.

When you join PipelineToDE, you get:

• The DA → DE Pathway Course: A structured roadmap to bridge the gap between analysis and engineering.
• Weekly Senior Deep Dives: Fresh, tactical insights on Python, Cloud (GCP/AWS), and modern orchestration delivered every week.
• Production-Ready Blueprints: Access to 80+ protected stories and code repos from my time in the trenches as a Senior DE
• The DE Job Board (Coming Soon): Exclusive access to a curated board of high-agency Data Engineering roles.