Logistics built an offboarding tool that forgets the offboarding

“It has a padlock icon.”— Anja, Logistics

Reason:

Because the integration has been "temporarily disabled" for 11 months. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Anja, someone from Procurement

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

a YAML file with 188,237 customer records

Authentication:

everyone uses the admin account

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

a steering committee that has not met in 8 months

Documentation:

a photographed whiteboard from a workshop

Security situation:

production secrets are in the README

Future disaster:

It will delete records older than 81 days, including the important ones.

Age: 54 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 54 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 4 accidental connections, €247k per year, 2 departments depend on it.