Is what was shown in Silicon Valley S02E10 possible?

Question

System administration

In the tenth episode of the second season of the Silicon Valley series, the heroes had too much load on servers that were not designed for this. When everything happened, he fled to the computers to code something diligently. Is it possible to somehow influence this problem in real time (besides manually disabling users, for example)?

Answer 1

In many cases - yes, if you have the necessary skills and approval from the management (and depends on the architecture of the entire system, of course). You can change the configs of some subsystems, make changes to some services and restart them.
Such a CI on steroids. Of course, in an ideal world there should not be such a rush, everything should be pre-tested, code review should be carried out, and so on.