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I see a lot of criticism of the deployment, but why did the developers "repurpose an old flag" that activates 8 years dead code that you haven't deleted and that has completely unknown current functionality? That seems like the strangest decision made in this debacle.

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To save time, I guess. They deleted the inactive code, so, why not, they thought. But then they forgot to deploy that change (to one server).

Bugs and configuration errors will happen from time to time, and might look silly in retrospect. But the real problem was, I think, that there was no kill switch (managers and tech leads should have decided to add long ago)

I mean.. beyond that, that flag was used by a system from 8 years ago? Perhaps they simply didn't know they were re-using it.

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