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App #848 Β· πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ the United States
Disaster score 570Legendary

R&D built an email campaign sender bypassing marketing

πŸ›οΈ Older than the departmentπŸ•ΈοΈ Load bearing
Users1
Departments0
Criticality12%
Money involved€1,963/yr
β€œYou need to know the exact link.”— Thomas, R&D
Reason:
Allegedly because the dashboard is updated manually every Thursday. With a settings page that does nothing.
Built by:
Thomas, a warehouse supervisor
Build time:
9 evenings
Built with:
Python and a cron job on a laptop
Database:
a CSV that gets overwritten every Friday
Authentication:
the audit log contains passwords
Deployment:
deployed behind a Cloudflare Tunnel from Petra's laptop
Responsible:
whoever answers the support email
Documentation:
a PDF containing screenshots of the old UI
Security situation:
logout only hides the menu
Future disaster:
It will be discovered during due diligence.

Accidentally connected to (5)

  • β†’ depends on email subject lines matching exactly
  • β†’ depends on an Excel macro
  • β†’ depends on a folder called Incoming
  • β†’ polls the API every 4 seconds
  • β†’ depends on a production secret copied from another project

⚠️ Removing this app may now destroy the company.

Age: 5.0 years Β· originally expected to last 3 weeks Β· 6 owners so far Β· survived 3 reorganisations Β· last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 5 accidental connections, alive 87x longer than intended, it is load bearing.

Current owner

Nobody has taken responsibility for this disaster.

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