TVC E. A man in UK typed in one tiny wrong piece of code, and inadvertently deleted all traces of his company.
That’s right – his entire company, along with all of the websites he looked after for his clients.
According to the Independent, hosting provider Marco Marsala went into a bit of a panic on a forum for server experts afterwards.
The command he typed in was ‘rm -rf’. For future reference, if you’re ever coding something, do not type this in.
This innocent-looking little five-character code actually tells the computer to delete everything, overriding all of the usual warnings that pop up when files are being deleted.
‘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),’ he wrote.
Sadly for him, the other experts weren’t too helpful – basically informing him that he’d probably destroyed his whole business.
‘I feel sorry to say that your computer is now essentially dead,’ one user wrote.
Another added: ‘You’re going out of business. You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer.’