Marketing built an email campaign sender bypassing marketing

“We'll document it after the quarter.”— HR Generalist

Reason:

Officially because two teams disagreed about a column name for 11 weeks. With a logo generated at 11:40.

Built by:

Miriam, someone from Procurement

Build time:

3 evenings

Built with:

Svelte, which nobody else here writes

Database:

the production database, directly, with write access

Authentication:

IP allow-list containing 0.0.0.0/0

Deployment:

hosted on a cloud account costing €29.80/month

Responsible:

an external agency with no contract on file

Documentation:

a Slack thread from September

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will break the day Miriam changes their password.

Age: 96 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 67 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: €186k per year, 3 accidental connections, 41% chance of becoming business critical.