Man Types The Wrong Code - And Deletes His Entire Company By Mistake

Most of us have made the odd mistake on our computers - but there’s usually an ‘undo’ button within easy reach.

Except, sometimes, there isn’t.

A man who ran an internet hosting company, Marco Masala, said that he had accidentally entered a short code - which had wiped all his computers, including the websites he hosted.

Not only that, but it had deleted the backups, too.

Marsala admitted that he had typed a command used to delete everything - without warnings - and that it had run on all his servers.

Masala wrote on hosting forum Server Fault, ‘I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers,” wrote Marco Marsala.

‘Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

‘All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).’

Sadly, the response from others on the forum was that he genuinely HAD just ‘deleted’ his entire company.

One wrote, ‘If you really don’t have any backups I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company.’