Tragedy of the Year: Businessman Accidentally Deletes His Entire Company Just by Changing a Computer Code

A business owner's worst ever nightmare has unfortunately become real after he accidentally deleted his business from cyberspace.

 

 

Office mishaps don't come much bigger than deleting the existence of your entire company.

 

Unfortunately, that was exactly what happened to hosting provider Marco Marsala - all because he changed one line of computer code .

 

Mr Marsala, who runs a web hosting company, was informed of the scale of his mistake by experts on a security forum when he posted a question asking how to fix it.

 

According to the Independent , Mr Marsala had typed the infamous line of code "rm-rf" that tells the computer to delete everything.

 

The "rm" stands for remove while the "r" specifies which directory and the "f" stands for force - which means it will ignore any warning about what is about to happen.

 

As well as wiping his own company off the face of the planet, Mr Marsala also erased the 1,535 client websites that used his hosting services.

 

That single line of Linux code is so infamous it's even become a kind of joke amongst coders.

 

“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).”

 

Unfortunately, the others on the forum weren't able to help him and simply offered some much-needed condolences.

 

“You're going out of business,” wrote Michael Hampton. “You don't need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer.”

 

"I feel sorry to say that your computer is now essentially dead," another user wrote.