Procurement built a customer health score with a formula in a comment

“The admin page isn't linked anywhere.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Allegedly because the architecture diagram contains a box labelled "manual step". Quietly rolled out to three countries.

Built by:

Nadia, a field technician

Build time:

8 minutes

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

one table called everything

Authentication:

the production token is in the onboarding document

Deployment:

hosted on Bastian's personal Vercel account

Responsible:

Finance, apparently

Documentation:

a screenshot of a photographed whiteboard

Security situation:

the session never expires

Future disaster:

It will trigger a call from the works council.

Age: 215 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €97k per year, 9 users, alive 4x longer than intended.