Yes. This should be treated as a serious management failure. Blame does not lie with the individual who made a simple mistake; it lies with the supervisory structure that allowed simple mistakes such as this to result in major data loss (and, as discussed in yesterday's thread [0], has made a series of other serious strategic mistakes that have likely caused them to end up with such inadequate internal hierarchies).

Something like this is not a mere oversight on the part of technical leadership; it's either negligence or incompetence. Whoever is responsible for GitLab's server infrastructure should be having very serious thoughts right now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13607890

That's why I was critical of the other article on HN recently that evangelized their remote work.

It's worth noting that compared to a good number of recent ish startups, GitLab now has (I believe) more than 160 or so employees. Someone could've owned a recurring task to work on backup processes (and I imagine, now, someone (or likely multiple people)).