I’m curious what the reprocusions are, if any, once a post mortem is completed and teams or individuals that contributed to the outage are identified. Is “causing” this a fireable offense?
Not unless there was malicious intent or willful negligence. Amazon is a data driven company. The data shows that a “blame” culture results in more incidents. (Airline industry taught us this: https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/maintenance_hf/library...)
Do you know this from experience? Or are you just guessing?
No. Amazon's culture is super big on blaming the system. I know of incidents where operators made mistakes doing stuff that directly caused really big outages - the postmortems were entirely about the (lack of) safety of the tooling involved that allowed a single person to make such a mistake, and involved examining all the tooling of entire business units to try to identify other tools that could have such an impact. No individual blaming is involved - and in fact, postmortems always refer to "the engineer" or "the operator" and never include names.
My friend was fired years ago for an AWS outage that took down Netflix. I don't know any other details, but should ask him.
lol, like employers need a real reason to fire someone in this day and age
It shouldn't be unless there was malicious intent.