CEO's Daughter built a visitor sign-in kiosk

“We only need it for this quarter.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Honestly? Because the spreadsheet has 84,371 rows and 81 tabs. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Daniel, an analyst

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

the filesystem.

Authentication:

authorization is handled in the UI

Deployment:

deployed by emailing Customers_final_FINAL_FIXED.csv to Priya

Responsible:

Tobias, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

none whatsoever

Security situation:

the admin URL contains the word secret

Future disaster:

It will get a staging environment after production breaks.

Age: 202 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 202 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €182k per year, 3 accidental connections, alive 14x longer than intended.