# the biggest IT screwup you've seen **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [August 11, 2001, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760 "2001-08-11T05:07:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Opengrave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/919ad9/32.png) [@Opengrave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Opengrave)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2001, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760/21 "2001-08-14T18:21:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Caldazar \* > \*\*Come 8AM the following morning, the rollout was still in progress. Network traffic lights were going nuts, bandwidth was maxed, and no one could get anything done. Frustrated that they couldn’t use their machines and not understanding why their machines weren’t working properly, users rebooted sat down at their stations and rebooted their machines. In the middle of operating system Service Pack rollout. End result: techs running around re-installing operating systems from scratch on all the machines that would no longer boot. \*\* Nice, _veeeeeeeery_ nice. We had a Programmer/DBA who did a very small system that was high visiblility. It had one form that accessed one table, it was a survey type of thing. Several thousand users input data all month and a report was created at the end of the month. All changes to the system always happend after the monthly report ran. The Programmer/DBA was working with limited test space so he copied the files over and edited a script to keep database size small. He figured he would remember to delete the extra code before moving to PROD. 1. Since he was a DBA he had the authority to move stuff to the production environment. 2. He did. 3. He also bypassed all QA/CM. 4. The script he edited… did I mention it was an event procedure for the form load and now started with **Delete \* from tbl\_data**? 5. No one suspected anything until the last day of the month and the report ran and only showed one record (the last user to fill out the form). 6. This had been going on for a _month_…backups? he figured since it was a small system _weekly_ was good enough. 7. The system name? **Governer’s task force on** … 8. He got sent home. ---
**Author:** ![Slacker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6bbea6/32.png) [@Slacker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slacker)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2001, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760/22 "2001-08-14T18:25:30Z")
> [@](#): > > NFBSK! says I Are you from snopes or slackercentral? 🙂 (I assume, snopes - that’s where I got it) ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2001, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760/23 "2001-08-14T20:15:04Z")
I have so many, but my personal favorite… This was how I got one of my jobs. Way back in when, departments would put up NetWare servers to get away from corporate IT and the big bad mainframe…corporate IT decided to centralize all department servers under corporate IT and started building their empire. They made all the servers standard. They all had standard apps. They took the server from the Tax Department and erased the non-standard apps. Like the one that was being used to file Federal Income Taxes two weeks before the IRS deadline. And the punchline of course…backups? We don’t need no stinkin’ backups. I became the Network Admin for Tax and Finance. Not answerable to IT. ---
**Author:** ![Doobieous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Doobieous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doobieous)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2001, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760/24 "2001-08-15T01:04:48Z")
Not that big of a deal, but this did happen at my school. We had been having network problems (we couldnt get into a program we use at Admissions called Banner), and we feared the system may crash. The next day, we find out that the entire IT staff had gone on a retreat. Without having anyone behind to help if the system did crash. What happened next? The system crashed, and we couldnt do _any_ work at all until the IT people returned from their retreat and fixed things. ---
**Author:** ![obfusciatrist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/4af34b/32.png) [@obfusciatrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/obfusciatrist)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2001, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760/25 "2001-08-15T01:37:49Z")
Major financial institution. Small little application server. Tech forgets bring it back up after a bounce. $300,000,000 in money does not end up where it was supposed to because that server was down for 38 minutes when it shouldn’t have been. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-biggest-it-screwup-youve-seen/75760.md?page=1)