You can not really stop stupid people. However many companies cripple their networks through so called "Security" measures. What do you do when you lock down everything to be accessed through a few servers and you experience a major network outage? Your time to resolution is crippled by having to use ancient back doors "Serial Access" to get back into these devices. Now you're losing customers on top of losing money, especially when it comes to compute clouds where you're literally billing by the hour. Even more so for long distance providers, cellular companies, and VOIP communications providers.
I am curious how the press of one key managed to wipe out the cloud, the load balancers, and the routers at the same time. Either they're using some program to manage their switching network which is the only key thing that could take it all out, or the idiot had the command queued up.
More likely some idiot introduced a cisco switch into their VTP domain and it had a higher revision number queued up and it overwrote their entire LAN environment. Simply fixed by requiring a password that way you can really nail an idiot that does it, and secondly bite the admin bullet and run vtp transparent mode.
There's no one command that's going to bring it all down, it's going to be a series of actions that result from a lack of proper network management, and lack of proper tested redundancy. Redundancy does not exist in the same physical facility, redundancy exists in a separate facility nowhere associated with anything that runs the backed up facility. Pull the plug on data center A, your customers should not notice a thing is amiss. If you can do that, then you have proper redundancy.
I believe the other problem is that were working on a 30+ year old protocol stack, and it's starting to show it's limitations. TCP/IP is great, but there needs to be some better upper layer changes that allow client replication to work as well. So if the App loses it's connection to server A, it seamlessly uses server B without so much as a hiccup. Something like keyed content where you can accept replies from two different sources, but the app can use the data as it comes in from each, much like bittorrent, but on a real time level. It requires twice the resources to handle an app, but if redundancy is king this type of system would be king and prevent some of the large outages we have seen in the past.