Destructive Cleanup Script
A single typo in a cleanup script led to the loss of production, staging, and backup servers, leaving a team in silence and panic.
The intern’s “harmless” cleanup script had one typo: rm -rf / instead of rm -rf ./. Production, staging, and the backup server — all mounted, all gone. The Slack channel went silent for ninety seconds. Then someone typed: “we have backups, right?” Nobody answered. The last snapshot was from March. It was November.
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