Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
I'm not sure how automated deployments would have solved this problem. In fact, if anything, it would have magnified the impact and fallout of the problem.<p>Substitute "a developer forgot to upload the code to one of the servers" for "the deployment agent errored while downloading the new binary/code onto the server and a bug in the agent prevented the error from being surfaced." Now you have the same failure mode, and the impact happens even faster.<p>The blame here lies squarely with the developers--the code was written in a non-backwards-compatible way.