CEO Office built an internal URL shortener

“SharePoint has version history.”— Miriam, CEO Office

Reason:

Officially because the correct dropdown option is "Other". Forked from a tutorial at 09:15 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Miriam, a field technician

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

dates stored as text in 8 different formats

Authentication:

the current password ends in 9

Deployment:

running on a VM with 1 GB of free disk space

Responsible:

Anja, who only knows the database

Documentation:

an email with the subject "quick overview"

Security situation:

a security review was scheduled for August and quietly cancelled

Future disaster:

It will gain 425 users before anyone approves it.

Age: 282 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 282 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 20x longer than intended, 18 users, 11% chance of becoming business critical.