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App #256 · 🇨🇭 Switzerland
Disaster score 570Legendary
The Management Assistant built a 'temporary' inventory system
🧟 Builder has left🏛️ Older than the department🕸️ Load bearing
Users1
Departments5
Criticality12%
Money involved€6,041/yr
“We only need it until the migration.”— HR Generalist
- Reason:
- Allegedly because the licence costs €49 plus a support contract. Started as Suppliers_FIXED.xlsx with a script attached.
- Built by:
- Petra, a key account manager
- Build time:
- one weekend
- Built with:
- WordPress with eleven plugins
- Database:
- a production table where the primary key is the customer's name
- Authentication:
- nobody knows the password, but the browser still does
- Deployment:
- hosted on Daniel's personal Vercel account
- Responsible:
- Bastian, who inherited it from Petra by accident
- Documentation:
- a Notion page titled "New docs"
- Security situation:
- the refresh token never expires
- Future disaster:
- It will get rewritten, producing exactly the same system.
Accidentally connected to (5)
- → uses the same API key in test and production
- → reads directly from the production database
- → depends on an Excel macro
- → depends on a firewall rule labelled TEMP
- → sends 139,038 records through email
⚠️ Removing this app may now destroy the company.
Age: 8.5 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago · original builder left 56 days ago
Rated legendary mostly because: 5 accidental connections, 5 departments depend on it, alive 104x longer than intended.
Current owner
Nobody has taken responsibility for this disaster.
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