R&D built a status page for internal systems

“Vercel probably handles backups.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Honestly? Because the deletion process requires a ticket, a manager and 3 approvals. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Lukas, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

8 evenings

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

Firestore because the prototype needed to ship by Friday

Authentication:

the MFA code is always 000000 in the test environment

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

IT Service Desk, who delegated it to somebody who left

Documentation:

a screenshot of a photographed whiteboard

Security situation:

it stores passwords, hashed with nothing

Future disaster:

It will get a Jira project before it gets documentation.

Age: 34 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 34 days ago · original builder left 35 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 2 departments depend on it, the builder has left, alive 2x longer than intended.