Somewhat related anecdote:<p>Some 10 years back I was working for a solar company doing SCADA stuff (monitoring remote power plant equipment, reporting generation metrics, handling grid interconnect stuff, etc).<p>We had a big room with lots of monitors that looked like a set in a Hollywood film, no doubt inspired by them. You could see all the solar installations all around the world that we monitored. The monitoring crew put out a call for engineers, stat, and as I walked into the monitoring room I could see perhaps 1/10th of the power plant icons on the wall we red "lost communication", one plant went green to red right in front of me.<p>This started a shitstorm with all hands be summoned. Long story short, somebody decided the best way to get an external IP for one of our remote gateways was to use curl command to a whatismyip.com type service, but instead of targeting Google (or you know, a server under our control), it hit some random ISP in Italy. The ISP most have eventually realized they were getting ping on by thousands of devices 24/7, so they decided they would drop some percentage of incoming requests silently, and of course the curl call was blocking without timeout. When the remote gateway's was dropped, it blocked indefinitely.<p>I skipped a lot in between but it was definitely a fun firefighting session, it was particularly hampered by a couple engineers that were quite high up on the food chain getting lead in the wrong direction (as to the root cause) at the beginning and fighting particularly hard against any opposing theories. It was the one time I basically got to drop the "I'm right and I bet my job on it." Fun times.