CEO's Daughter built Excel with a login screen

“We only need it until the new ERP goes live.”— Olivier, CEO's Daughter

Reason:

Allegedly because the approval requires 9 people for a €38,000 purchase. Already exported 37,195 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Olivier, the management assistant

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

a SharePoint list with 18,875 items

Authentication:

the API key is called PUBLIC_API_KEY

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Thursday, no staging

Responsible:

Kevin, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

a Miro board that takes 2 minutes to load

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will send 81,336 duplicate emails.

Age: 116 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 67% chance of becoming business critical, €22k per year, alive 8x longer than intended.