In a Daily WTF feature, Remy Porter describes Coveralls as a service that receives lcov reports from CI pipelines and provides coverage insights. Teams can configure it to fail a build when newly added code falls below the required coverage level. At Porter’s employer, CI jobs began failing on February 24 because Coveralls was unavailable. Many other users encountered the same problem.

Coveralls published updates throughout the incident, sometimes only seconds or minutes apart. The company’s postmortem says Amazon shut down its services after treating the account as unpaid, even though the bills had been paid. Coveralls took roughly 68 hours to identify that as the cause. The later updates became increasingly desperate.

Porter presents the status messages as an unauthorized dramatic reading and acknowledges taking liberties with them. He notes that most companies would struggle if their cloud provider locked their accounts. The sharpest joke comes from Coveralls asking users to get in touch if they could help migrate the service away from AWS.