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8 Comments

I made a bug that did cost $8,000.

Due to a bug, screen.studio app kept downloading the auto-update file repeatedly, every 5 minutes for every single user. The update file is approximately 250MB. This resulted in 9 million file downloads and more than 2 petabytes (2,000,000 gigabytes) of traffic on Google Cloud.

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SaaS Journeys
on May 7, 2023
  1. 1

    Billing alarms...

  2. 1

    Ooof this one hurts, lucky you had those credit card limits at least! Who knows how much longer it could have gone on without it!

  3. 1

    Thank you for letting us know. We are also working on a video tool, and we will try to add specific limits to ensure we remain on the safe side. I have bookmarked this and shared it with my team to check this.

  4. 1

    Wow, you did not have any billing alerts?

  5. 1

    Are you able to contest the charge?

  6. 1

    Ouch this one is painful. I’m curious how you caught it?

    It might be worth installing some safeguards on the server side to prevent an issue like this in the future. You could configure a rule to only serve 1TB of traffic a day or something like that.

  7. 1

    Oh dear, sorry to hear... are there some tests you can write to prevent this particular case from happening again?

  8. 1

    That's interesting! do you mind sharing more details about how you did this?

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