It's been interesting watching this all play out on an open source social network. It's all out in the open so it caused quite the drama, but the actual order of events? Site goes down and is back up and vulnerability patched like 4 hours later? That's really impressive.
In my opinion the "drama" was a critical part of immediately drawing attention to the voulnerabilty and bringing it to the attention of most instance admins very quickly.
Few things that have been added on my to-do list that I've learned from this.
We need more backend man power for coverage.
Major instances, and probably all instances should partner with another instance that's in an opposite time zone for emergency response. Ideally having partnered admins and backend admins with no more than 8 hours difference between each one for 24 hour reliable coverage would be ideal. Partnered admins should in my opinion have each other's phone numbers and have it set to bypass do not disturb.
We need to make sure users know how to contact admins off Lemmy for emergencies, as well as ensure that admins are tagged when a situation like this develops. (To my knowledge no lemmy.ca admin was tagged when this started to unfold.)
There's more thoughts but I can't remember them on 5 hours of sleep 😴