Classic WTF: The Logger That Couldn't Log Its Own Errors
The Daily WTF · July 21, 2026
curated by Sönke
A revisited Daily WTF classic follows developer Adam C., hired to fix a VXML platform that kept collapsing under light load. Digging through logs full of a cryptic 'Exception encountered writing error log' message, he traced it to Java code that shelled out to /usr/bin/logger via Runtime.exec() instead of using the logging framework already in use elsewhere in the project.