Logistics built a customer feedback wall

“We have a diagram.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Officially because the budget appeared unexpectedly on Wednesday. Built in 1 hours 14 minutes and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Olivier, a working student

Build time:

19 minutes

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

an S3 bucket called production-old with public access "temporarily" enabled

Authentication:

the session never expires because that was annoying

Deployment:

behind a domain that still contains the word demo

Responsible:

a vendor whose support contract expired 12 months ago

Documentation:

comments in the code explaining what the code used to do

Security situation:

the audit log records "updated successfully"

Future disaster:

It will be mentioned in an audit finding using the words "material weakness".

Age: 8.9 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 836 users, 85% chance of becoming business critical, alive 108x longer than intended.