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Programmers, what is the biggest fuck up you’ve ever seen caused by a tiny mistake in the code?

One of our developers was performing a licensing check to see if they should do a thing. If the check failed, the temp folder path would not be changed, leaving it as the working directory. The destructor still was deleting the temp folder. The end result was if someone didn’t have this option, the bin folder(whole application) would try to delete itself.

Back in the 90s I used to work For a financial company. We were collecting data for Fortune 500 companies are we made reports and other printed products. One day I thought I was running a script on the test database but I was actually running it on the production database. So, I deleted a whole lot of production data which was critical for next morning’s paper. My boss went white, called an emergency meeting and I admitted my mistake. Luckily he was a great guy, and we all focused on how to recover from my stupid mistake. Everything was fine in the end. Thanks Richard !!

Looks like someone just watched the latest Tom Scott video… 😉

The Mars Climate Orbiter

I work for a finance platform where someone accidentally managed to alter the decisioning piece so that it accepted loan applications that it should have declined.
Another where accidentally running an old script resubmitted lots of applications resulting in the need to correct their credit files.