Finance built a headcount planning app

“It's technically not production.”— Priya, Finance

Reason:

Mainly because two teams disagreed about a column name for 8 weeks. Already exported 135,270 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Priya, someone from Procurement

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

a MongoDB with no password on port 27017

Authentication:

"auth is on the roadmap" — has been for 411 days

Deployment:

on a VM created for a workshop in 2019

Responsible:

Priya, someone from Procurement. Only Priya.

Documentation:

an email with the subject "quick overview"

Security situation:

the penetration test found it by accident

Future disaster:

It will duplicate every record after a timezone change.

Age: 2.2 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago · original builder left 387 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 2 accidental connections, alive 27x longer than intended, 22% chance of becoming business critical.