Quality Assurance built a customer health score with a formula in a comment

“It's basically a spreadsheet with buttons.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Officially because Headcount_FIXED.xlsx finally crashed at 11:43. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Jens, a key account manager

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

an AI agent with shell access

Database:

a Postgres database called new containing 3 years of production data

Authentication:

Basic Auth over plain HTTP

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

Jens, currently on parental leave

Documentation:

none whatsoever

Security situation:

the penetration test found it by accident

Future disaster:

It will trigger a call from the works council.

Age: 134 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 4 departments depend on it, alive 19x longer than intended, €33k per year.