HBO Max customers may have been perplexed by the "Integration Test Email #1" they received to their inboxes Thursday night. HBO admits it goofed, placing the blame on an intern. And customers have seemed forgiving, saying mistakes happen.
Beyond the subject line, the only thing the email said was "This template is used by integration tests only."
After word spread on social media from confused subscribers, HBO Max tweeted an explanation.
"We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it," the HBOMaxHelp account tweeted.
A lot of people on Twitter responded in a completely forgiving mood for the intern, expressing the mistakes they have made in their careers and how they got over them.
"Dear intern," one person tweeted. "It’s ok. I dropped a prod database when I was a senior engineer. These things happen more often than you might think. Building good systems is about having resilience against human mistakes. Because we, humans, always make mistakes."
"I woke up to that email this morning and immediately thought, 'oof - been there buddy.'" tweeted another. "We've all broken production! Besides, as a great boss once told me, if you never make mistakes you're not really trying. It's gonna be ok!"
"One time I fat finger deleted our entire application without backing it up (thankfully we were able to recover) but I was stressed for 4 days (while my boss fixed it) and cried everyday. Thankfully i have great coworkers and everyone laughed it off but still," tweeted another.