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The Power of Small Changes How One Enum Disruption Turned Facebook's Infrastructure Upside Down
Welcome to The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. Today we’re diving into a tale of how a small change sent Facebook’s infrastructure into a tailspin. In an effort to be more inclusive, Facebook added “civil union” to its list of relationship statuses. Sounds simple, right? But as the post points out, “we didn’t realize that this enumeration was hard-coded across dozens of services.”
The moment “civil union” hit production, millions of profile requests started failing. APIs that assumed only five statuses began throwing errors. Reports of 500-level crashes poured in. As the article puts it, “a single missing enum value can bring down an entire microservice architecture.”
The fix? A big coordinated rollout to update every service, SDK, and client library with the new status. The takeaway: even minor enum changes need careful impact analysis. Thanks for listening to The Pragmatic Engineer. See you next time for more lessons from real-world engineering.
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By jawbreaker.ioWelcome to The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. Today we’re diving into a tale of how a small change sent Facebook’s infrastructure into a tailspin. In an effort to be more inclusive, Facebook added “civil union” to its list of relationship statuses. Sounds simple, right? But as the post points out, “we didn’t realize that this enumeration was hard-coded across dozens of services.”
The moment “civil union” hit production, millions of profile requests started failing. APIs that assumed only five statuses began throwing errors. Reports of 500-level crashes poured in. As the article puts it, “a single missing enum value can bring down an entire microservice architecture.”
The fix? A big coordinated rollout to update every service, SDK, and client library with the new status. The takeaway: even minor enum changes need careful impact analysis. Thanks for listening to The Pragmatic Engineer. See you next time for more lessons from real-world engineering.
Link to Article