A lot of comments here blaming management and executives, but bear in mind: who was the person who wrote the buggy code? Who was the person who pushed the release button? Sure, broken process, poor release engineering practices, whatever. And who, ultimately, implemented those release engineering processes?
The engineer who caused all this has surely already been fired, but that's just scratching the surface--I hope this is brought to court as criminal negligence.
Why do we have operating systems? So that programs cannot cause this sort of problem.
Who required the operating system to be undermined in the name of security? It wasn't that programmer.
Who created the regulatory environment where such decisions actually look like a good idea? It sure wasn't any programmer.
What does real engineering look like?
When the decision was made to use a li-on battery instead of a RAT in the 787, the battery was designed to be fail safe. There was no way it could fail.
The engineer who created the enclosure for it in the airplane started with the assumption that it would fail catastrophically, and that the enclosure would need to contain it.
It's a good thing he did, because that battery did fail, and the enclosure kept the plane from failing.
This analogy breaks down when you actually think about its real-world applications.
Structural engineers are held at criminal fault if a bridge they signed off on collapses. Ok, now why do we have the bridge in the first place? Because city planning segregated residential and commercial zones across a body of water. And who was responsible for that decision? The city planning council?
So if a bridge collapses and hundreds of people die you put the blame on the politician who signed off on zoning laws, instead of the engineer who designed a broken bridge?
The engineer who caused all this has surely already been fired, but that's just scratching the surface--I hope this is brought to court as criminal negligence.