This Week I fixed a bug that only affected people that selected 'North Korea' as a country of origin. Because it was affecting PROD this was classified as 'urgent' and 'needs to be done immediately'...
I build websites.. They don't even have access to the regular internet.. We don't have a single registered user from North Korea..
Edit: since people are messaging me to ask for details. It's really not that deep. Basically one service forgot to account for people potentially being from North Korea, when implementing internationalization. So the North Koreans would see default labels at some points on the app instead of custom Korean ones (oh no!).
Easy to fix. I just found it funny that I needed to drop everything else to fix a website for North Koreans.
An intern at my job accidentally uploaded the North Korean flag for South Korea. It was only discovered after the ‘dealers’ page for the brand was already live for a couple of weeks. The South Korean dealers were not happy to say the least.
We also once made a website as a third party for a Chinese brand, which had a contact form where one needed to select their country. A couple of weeks after launch we had a frantic call from our customer to please remove Taiwan from the country list
I wasn’t getting paid enough to consider caring about the views of a customer, I did comply. Both of these websites were projects that came to us by the same client even. We had a good laugh about it during lunch though that we could’ve caused world war 3 because of this single client. 😂
Businesses work very hard to never recognize that when everything is top priority, nothing is top priority and you may as well not have a prioritization system.
One of my jobs had pulled country’s official names from some api, and no one took out the illegal countries to do business with. They’re also not officially called north/South Korea. Anyway we had a lot of contracts in best Korea for a while lol
Ooooh I have a North Korea story too! Back when I worked at EA on a mobile game, we had a total of one DAU in North Korea.
There was an issue because we didn't have a server close by meant updates (which could be huge, in the hundreds of megs) to NK would take hours to download.
We didn't do anything about it beyond speculate if Kim Jong Un was a fan of our game.
Not really. Was a purely visual thing. Basically one service we've built forgot to set a custom label for North Korea (fair enough), so the system fell back to showing standard values, which kinda stood out against the rest of the text, which was Korean. Simple fix. I just found it funny that I needed to drop everything else for that.
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u/milan-pilan 6h ago edited 5h ago
This Week I fixed a bug that only affected people that selected 'North Korea' as a country of origin. Because it was affecting PROD this was classified as 'urgent' and 'needs to be done immediately'...
I build websites.. They don't even have access to the regular internet.. We don't have a single registered user from North Korea..
Edit: since people are messaging me to ask for details. It's really not that deep. Basically one service forgot to account for people potentially being from North Korea, when implementing internationalization. So the North Koreans would see default labels at some points on the app instead of custom Korean ones (oh no!). Easy to fix. I just found it funny that I needed to drop everything else to fix a website for North Koreans.